SEO Consultant Ireland

Anyone who has a web site where the traffic is crucial to the success of the web site is pulling his hairs in the last couple of months. Why? On average the total amount of the Internet traffic is falling. If you monitor the web traffic of 100 or more web sites, you cannot not to notice the negative trend. And the general trend is a decline.

What does the recession have to do with it?

It is not really the question to answer. There are a number of the scenarios one can imagine:

1. There are less people working, so perhaps less people with the internet access.
2. People are more busy since their colleagues have been made redundant and their workload is spread on the remaining staff.
3. People just do not want to be seen surfing in the office – since they are afraid for their jobs.
4. People have better things to do but to surf endlessly.
5. …I am sure there are many more reason you can think of.

It is the first time in the history of the web (I am sure you like those ‘Biggest Recession’ phrases by now) that the overall Internet traffic volume is decreasing.

But don’t despair! If your traffic is falling, there is the SEO Consultant to get your traffic growing again!

To make sure the search results are relevant and SPAM clean Google doesn’t rank well two web sites that contain the same content. This is to prevent the search results for a term being a copy of one another. Google wants to present a variety of the most relevant results – not copies of even the most relevant.

To achieve this Google, and any other search engine for that matter has to make sure it does not contain more than one copy of the same site in its index. Bear in mind that the different images and different colours and font styles mean nothing to Google since Google is a text search engine. The fact that the web site can look completely different to the visitor means nothing to the search engine as long as the text on the pages is the same.

http://www.copyscape.com is a search engine that is looking for the sites that are similar to yours. It is actually connection to the Google API to find duplicates. If you feel you have a problem ranking your site it is worth checking if there is another copy on the web.

Why is my web site copied?

Web traffic has a value. Web traffic can be monetised. Google AdSense is one of the simplest ways to do it. IF you have a web site with visitors, Google will gladly become your partner and serve the ads from their Google AdWords customers on your pages.

The content of the page is the key of acquiring the web site traffic from the natural results in the search engines. This is why people copy your content to publish it to their own web site. Is it legal? Absolutely not. Does it hurt your web site ranking – in most cases yes. Should yo be doing something about it – yes if you intend to rank your website content high in the search engine results pages.

SEO Consultant (we) also provide the service of managing the duplicate content issues for the clients. Contact us and we can help you if your content gets copied.

Leading the search engine listings are the sites with:
1. Good Content
2. Links to your site
3. Relevant Title tags and Meta tags on your pages

It does sound easy, but is so often forgotten.

‘Good Content’

So what do this SEO people mean when they say ‘Good Content’?!

Good content is the content that is good for the visitor and the search engine. It has to be informative for people to read it, and it needs to contain keywords for the search engines to understand what it is about. Majority of the people write this way anyway. It is hard to write about search engine optimization for example without mentioning the phrase search engine optimisation in the text, isn’t it? The search engines of today are even smart enough to ‘understand’ your abbreviations in the text so one could argue that one can use the SEO instead of the full name. Unfortunately even that the search engine understands the abbreviations for the keyword ranking those are not included. Use SEO to tank for SE, but write a full search phrase: search engine optimization if you want to rank high for it.

The good content has to be unique – you cannot take the text from a page that the search engines has in their indexes already. The content duplication issues arise and those are best to be avoided. So write the original content, your content.

Relevancy is another aspect of the quality of the content that the search engines love. If your whole site is about SEO, and you have one page about Siamese cats, that poor page will never rank really high for the term it is relevant for – the Siamese cats.

The web site SEO Consultant is 4 months old today. Just a short recap of the achievements:

1. Google PR 5
2. Listed 4th for the keyword SEO (http://www.google.ie/search?q=seo)

Err,… nothing else really!

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?

After some 2 and a half months, the SeoSonsultant.ie is on the first page in Google for the search keyword ‘SEO’, with the option ‘Pages in Ireland’ selected.

The blog activity statistics in those two months is:

Blog Stats
There are currently 20 posts and 27 comments, contained within 6 categories and 50 tags.

So not really impressive, 20 posts in 2 months? And already on the first page in Google.ie for the keyword SEO?

The next and the last milestone is to get listed on the first page in Google.ie without the ‘Pages in Ireland’ option selected! Any bets?

Anyone who ever had a web site wanted his web site to appear on the first page in Google for the important keywords. People just assume that since they invested into the development of their web site, that they ‘deserve’ to be listed, and listed high in the search engine results pages (SERP) What people do not consider is the size of the competition. Google itself for many, many years shows exactly that – The size of the competition, besides every search result it produces. Check the image below showing the number of pages that Google has indexed that contain the word ‘SEO’.

Results 1 – 10 of about 165,000,000 for seo.

What Google is telling us is that there is about 165 millions of pages of the web pages that contain the word SEO that Google has found and included in the search engine results. By default Google shows 10 pages per page, so the first page only shows the top 10 of the 165 millions of pages. Jet every site owner wants to get listed there. Unfortunately there is space for the top ten web sites only.

To display more relevant and local search results Google does not display the same results to everyone. Based on your location (your IP actually) Google will display the results that are ‘more relative’ to your location that the overall top 10 highest ranked pages.

Google even allows limiting the search results to just the pages it has indexed from your country. For our sample search for the word ‘SEO’ if the option ’pages from Ireland’ is checked, note that the result actually contains a much smaller sumo of pages, just 274 000 pages as opposed of the 165 000 000 pages on the whole web that Google has in it’s index.

Note that the search results page with the ’pages in Ireland’ option selected contains far more local web sites, the majority of them the Irish domains ending with the ‘ie’ or ‘,com’s’ hosted on the servers in Ireland.

Knowing that there is about 274 000 pages in Ireland and 165 000 000 pages on the web that all compete for the same keyword ‘SEO’, how likely is that this new web site SEO Consultant will ever get listed on the first page as specified in the SEO Speed Test?

“A picture says more than a thousand words.” – approach is used in the search engine optimization reporting a lot. All the SEO reporting tools and software draw nice visual graphics reports. Little green arrows for the keywords performing better in the last period, and the red arrows for the badly performing keywords. The graphs for the numbers of hits, number of unique visitors, the length the average visitor have spent on he site, pages he visited…

Pictures in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Reports are there just to make the reports easier to read and understand. But the true question every buyer of the SEO services is really:

When are we going to get first in Google?

That is all really the average buyer is interested. All the rest is noise really.

So where is SEOConsultant.ie placed today in the index of the Google.ie?
http://www.google.ie/search?q=seoconsultant.ie

NOWHERE!

The domain is registered just before lunch today, so the obvious it true. The SEO Consultant web site did not make it to the search engine results page (SERP) jet.