SEO Consultant Ireland

The mystery around the search engine optimization is slowly disappearing, but the large proportion of the online marketing people are still not quite sure what exactly the search engine optimization is. There are still people who are 100% hooked in the META Tags (and meta tags only!). There is a lot of people who still think it is about a few tricks here and there on your web site. What is good is that there is fortunately less and less marketers that still want to throw the search engine optimization to their IT department. Or even better on the outsourced IT website development company!

I read somewhere a comparison of the search engine optimization and a weight loss:

Search engine optimization as a weight loss takes time. No quick fixes available.

You need to make changes to your site and to your diet. No changes made, and sometimes drastically changes, no (rank) gain or (weight) loss.

You must be in it for a long term.

‘One size fits all’ product does not exist. As our bodies are different, our habits (how much do you eservice each day?), the web sites are different. The web sites compete in the different markets, where some are crowded and some are there to be taken easily. The search engine optimization packages like Bronze, Silver & Gold will do no good to the 95% of the web sites. It will do no harm, but also you will not see any measurable improvement in your revenue after investing in those once of ‘Perfect Fit’ search engine optimization packages.

Understanding is the key to success. What you eat and how much of it, and how much do you exercise is the basics of any weight loss program that will deliver a result. Having a proper content on the site correctly ‘presented’ to the search engine, with the correct amount of links to your site from the ‘important’ sites to your market is the key to success. The rest is just marketing and packaging of eh search engine optimization service. The rest is a vocabulary of the sales man.

Wordtracker:

People use different words when they search for your products online. Use these ‘keywords’ in your website copy and people will find your site when they search.

Sounds simple this Keyword Analysis, doesn’t it?

But in the reality this is it. You need to use the words you want to be found for on your own web site. Google is the Indexing Service in its essence. It reads web pages and answers the users searches based on the search phrases. Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine is the same.

So what is and how to do Keywords Analysis?

Keyword Analysis is the process of finding the keywords you should use on your site. There are number of tools that can help you expand your original list. The list can actually start from the one word. For example let’s say that this site is about ‘SEO’. The aim is that people who are looking for SEO in the search engines find this site. The most obvious way to do it is to use the keyword SEO a lot around a site. But not everyone will just type SEO in the search engine. People might type a search phrase like ‘SEO Ireland’, or ‘SEO Dublin’. Someone else will type ‘Best SEO’ or ‘SEO Company’. Someone will type ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. There are numerous ways one cal search for the topic, or something in particular about that topic. This is where Keyword Analysis comes in. Use the tools to suggest you the lists of keywords related to yours. Then put the synonyms in the tools and request suggestions for those as well. Include in your list of keywords ALL the ones related to your original term.

Keywords Analysis will give a list of thousand or more keywords. If you repeat the steps above multiple times, you will end up with a number of thousands. It is good. But what is the value of each keyword?

The value of a keyword is defined by the number of web sites competing for it (the less the better since it is more likely your site can get on top) and the volume of the searches performed for it. The more searches are made each day for that keyword the more traffic the keyword brings to the top ranked sites. Use this Keyword Value calculation to determine what are the most important keywords and take a special attention to those. Those are the keywords you will want to use a lot on your site, and most likely create a separate page dedicated to each one of them. That page will be used as a Landing Page for the search traffic for that keyword.

With the SEO staff there is always a dilemma, if to put them in the IT or the Marketing department. Unfortunately that is the one that does not really have the right answer. SEO should not really be neither with the IT nor Marketing. SEO staff need to be in between those two, probably reporting to the same management level where you IT (or Development if you are in IT company) and Marketing are reporting.

Why is SEO ’so important’?
Well the SEO staff have a job to make sure that the IT and Marketing excel in what they do without clashing into each other’s territory.

What makes a good SEO professional?

The term Team Player describes well what a SEO staff need to be good at. Unfortunately this is completely incompatible with one of the most important skills required for the perfect SEO person and it is entrepreneurship. SEO is changing and evolving rapidly. The SEO person needs to be a serious ‘forward thinker’. Again, being a visionary and the analytical is again extremely rare in the same person. Statistical Analysis is the base and the start of any SEO. There is a high level of leadership skills required to get the web developers and marketing staff involved constructively into the common project, and make them byte in to it. Vendor management skills, and negotiation skills in general is certainly required to manage the external SEO and PPC vendors, partners and consultants.

Let’s just list the skills described above in a simple list:

Team Player vs. Entrepreneur (Soloist, Leader)
Statistical Analysis (Detail Oriented) vs. Creative Forward Thinker
Negotiator vs. Charismatic
Management Experience
Results Driven (doesn’t it sound so much like ‘Black Hat’)
….

The more you define your SEO staff requirements the more complex it gets. It actually gets to the utopia stage, since there as a so many so conflicting skills required. Perhaps hiring the SEO staff in house doesn’t sound as that good idea anymore?

SEO: To Outsource or Not to Outsource?

A raising number of the businesses are linked one way or another to the Internet, and with it in some way with the search engine optimisation (SEO). Interment marketing plays the more and more important role every day, simply since people use internet more and more in their everyday life. Even if you see something in your local shop, you are quite likely to go online and just check the prices in the other shops, and the user reviews, the manufacturers web site…

Companies know nowadays they need to invest heavily in the Internet Marketing. Pay Per Click (PPC) is where almost everyone starts, just being seduced by the simplicity and the transparency of it. Of and not to forget – the low cost entry to the market. Some take a few days, but the majority of the PPC advertisers require more than a year to realise the real costs of the PPC, and get to the ‘Panic Mode’ looking for anything else but PPC after realising how little they got for their money invested.

A strategically important decision is usually made then, to stop the PPC and get down the organic listing route and optimise the company web site for the search engines. SEO usually then becomes a ‘Hot Potato’ in the company. If there is a separate Marketing Department and the IT Department, they will try to pass it on to each other. IN reality, the likelihood that any of the internal resources knows enough about SEO is fairly slim, since SEO is not what the company has been doing so far. So a new type of task is now within the company, and a new skill is required. The management usually fails to understand the fact that the SEO skills do not exist within the staff of the company. Therefore the majority of the initial SEO efforts are performed ‘in house’. When no results are achieved, or the results have no impact at the bottom line, the question gets raised:

To outsource or not to outsource the SEO, the question is now….?

Management will be guided by the costs of the both options to determine what route to go. Seeing the quotes from the SEO companies, as opposed to the ‘zero’ cost of performing the SEO internally puts them in front of the simple position to decide to keep the SEO in house!

This is the list of questions that should help determining if to outsource or keep the SEO in house:
1. Do we have a resources available to allocate to the SEO?
2. Do we have anyone who knows how to do SEO tasks?
3. Do we know what tasks are actually required to be done at all?
4. Do we know how much will the training cost to get our staff in the position to do SEO tasks?
5. Do we know how much time will be required to get the staff trained, and when will the training be available?
6. Do we know what is our SEO goal (why do we do it actually) in the exact numbers?
7. Can we measure our SEO successes (and failures)?
8. What is the budget for the SEO software and online tools required to perform the SEO tasks?

The above are really just the basic questions. If you cannot answer just one of those, the likelihood of any effect of your internal SEO efforts on your business are very slim.

The vast majority of the web sites have almost no traffic at all. How about yours?

Almost anyone who sad published a web site realised after the hype in the office quietened, that there is something missing. There was no visitors to the web site. You learned to be patient, and have been watching the web logs, but time is passing and there is still just a ‘flat line’ A few visitors, mostly from your own IP. When a first referral from a search engine showed up, it gave you hope, but in reality the keyword used was you domain name. Months pass by and still nothing really. No visitors, and a spider visiting a home page and a few more pages only, once in a week or a month.

Then you realise, I need to do something to bring this visitors to my site. SEO is the magic word there. Let’s invest in it, but…

How much does SEO cost?

I have been asked that question a million times so far. And still there is no definite answer, but here is the sentence that made me thinking today:

The budget for marketing a site in the first month should be equal to the budget for building the site in the first place.

To anyone who has just purchased a new web site this is most likely shocking to say at least. You have paid through the roof for the web site, and now you need t spend as much into online marketing of it. And all that in the first month only? What happens the next month, and any other month later on?!

SEO is Expensive

Paying a few dollars per inbound link to a company in Asia is cheap. And every day you receive an offer for such services in your inbox. Just check your SPAM or Junk folders. Will that bring you any good (visitors). Quite unlikely.

SEO is Time Consuming

A SEO Consultant will most likely have to rewrite the majority of the content on the site. In some cases the whole site (code) will have to be replaced by something the search engines can read and understand. The top SEO Consultants will if at all possible look into replacing the whole web site with a completely new one. The look and feel will be the same, the content will be retained, and a lot of new one added (in most cases), but the code will be completely replaced in the end product.

Is SEO for You?

SEO is not for everyone. That is the fact. SEO is a viable investment to any web site owner who will make a return on investment from the direct on indirect sales from the traffic on the web site.

What is your SEO Budget?

The importance of blogging for business is pretty much undisputed at this stage. Even the worst ‘hard core conservative’ marketers do admit that the blog is one of the most powerful online marketing tools in existence today. The problem with blogs is that it is not easy to start, and it is even harder to keep it going. Here are a few tips on how to make your blog successful:

1. Blog about your work
Choose a blog topic, and a perspective to the topic that is closely related to your day to day work. You cannot really blog about what you do exactly, since it is quite likely going to reveal the company secrets. You need to find and angle or the perspective that will allow you to completely open and express yourself, in writing about the topic.

2. Make Blogging a Part of Your Work
To me able to continue publishing your blog post constantly, you need to allocate time for it. You need to schedule a time when you will not be distracted by your phone, email, instant messaging, Skype, colleague inviting you for a cup of coffee. Blogging for Business has to be treated as a serious business. If you allow blogging to be low on the list of your priorities, your blog will suffer from irregularity of posting. If you do not devote your time to it, it will most likely simply… wilt.

Business success is a blog killer!

If you business blog is not about your own business, you are likely to quit blogging quickly! I just noticed I did not post a single blog post to my blog for a full 10 days. I was simply too busy. Clients ringing, requesting, demanding,… and you just do not have the time. Well it is all wrong. You need to plan, and manage the changes the blogging brings:
1. Allocate the time required for blogging
2. Allocate the additional time (resources) required to manage the increase of the new business that came as a result of blogging
3. Make sure the increased volume of your primary work does not eat up the time you allocated for blogging initially!

Blogging is the extension of a company marketing department or a public relations department.
There certainly is a need for a dedicated resource to mange not only the company blog, but the whole plethora of the social media sites and online networks.

How to structure and organise your company blogging?

Create a new position. Call it a ‘Chief Blogger’ or however your companies position titles are structured. Do not make it report to the Marketing manager, but to the same head where the Marketing Manager is reporting. Allocate a percentage of your marketing budget to the Blogging Department.

What should a Chief Blogger do?

Company Business Blog
The first step into the blogging world is to create a company blog under the company domain. Structure your blog based on the type and amount of the content you intend to publish, and the participation (content contribution in the form of comments, etc) you are looking for. Publish your initial ‘static’ articles about your company, services or products. Start blogging!

Social Networking
Search for the blogs related to yours. Leave comments, contribute in discussions. Develop the ‘Trust’ and the feeling of the ‘Authority’, associated with you and your company name. Trust and respect will help you bring visitors to your blog. Some of those visitors are partners and some your future clients! The sales process is far shorter if they see you as an authority in your industry!

Matt Cuts is a good example of a Business Blogging for Google: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

The page where Google describes the Search engine optimization has a nice definition at the start:

SEO is an abbreviation for “search engine optimizer.” Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be submitted.

If you look at the quoted text, you will even notice a typo in it, an unusual occurrence on Google’s pages. It is obvious that this is a very sensitive page on their site, and was not published in the usual way since the editors and proof readers would easily spot the error.

Google obviously has a problem presenting any data about SEO on its web ssite. It is understandable since SEO is in its core the reverse engineering of the search algorithm that Google is hiding vigorously.

But Google’s definition of the SEO does not stop there. It continues with:

However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.

Further on the words like used on that page are : Beware, avoid, doubts, trust, illegal, spam, illicit practice, illusion, skeptical,… ad the list goes on an on.

The page where Google explains what SEO is actually ends up with the following text:

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on “File a Complaint Online,” call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:
Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580
If your complaint is against a company in another country, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.

It really is very obvious that Google wants you to think about SEO as a blasphemy if nothing worse. Are they really so afraid of the people looking into the search engine optimization? Is scare tactics really the best approach here? My opinion is that this is the result of the lack of analysis on how will this reach the reader. It is negative. Negative is not professional (in most cultures). Pointing your visitors to the avenues of placing complaints about companies is just a bit inappropriate from the Google PR people. Search engine optimization should not be their problem unless they make it so themselves.