SEO Consultant Ireland

SEO Consultant in the press again. This time in the InBusiness magazine by Chambers Ireland. Here are a few snippets:

Social networking websites have been around for quite a while now, with early models emerging in the mid-‘90s. Websites such as Theglobe.com and Tripod.com sought to bring online users together to interact with each other through chat rooms and shared personal information. However, no one could have been prepared for the rapid increase and popularity of sites such as Facebook and MySpace over the course of the last five or six years. Now, marketing and advertising professionals are jumping on the social networking bandwagon and offering clients online marketing packages which include profile pages on social networking websites.

According to Ivan Stojanovic, Founder and Director of SEOConsultant.ie, a consultancy firm specialising in online marketing and search engine optimisation, companies are in danger of being left behind if they fail to implement a social media marketing plan.“Companies staying away from social networking sites are going to get into a situation where their much smaller competitors all of the sudden become more well-known brands,” says Stojanovic. “The speed and reach of online social media is unmatched by anything yet,” he added.

Last week I was invited and have attended IIA Congress 2009 and the IIA & Enterprise Ireland Net Visionary Awards 2009 on 21-22 May. It really was nice, and I would like to compliment the organisers and thank again for the invitation.

Colm Long from facebook had an interesting presentation, and I guess the most impressive fact and slide was the ‘stickability’ of facebook. Curently they are at 200 million users who are active on the site (have logged on in last 30 days).

Just a clarification that is this many users: 200000000
(for the record…)

The Welcome Pack of the IIA Congress 2009 was also nice. Inside was also a sponsored USB Memory Stick by Elucidate. When I plugged it in I was a bit disappointed that the capacity was only 512 Mb. Lately when I think of the storage I think in gigabytes and terabytes. Then again it was a really pleasant surprise that the memory chip is obviously quite fast since my Microsoft Windows Vista accepted it as a storage for the ReadyBoost – extension of your RAM on the external disc. The Elucidate Flash Drive will obviously be a very good friend of my Notebook that has ‘only’ 2 GB of RAM, so additional 512MB is more than welcome!

The fact that my last blog post is about 2 months old is a sign that something happened to the blog, or actually happened to the author of the blog. So what happened exactly that made me effectively stop blogging?

Twitter, Blogger, Facebook and LinkedIN happened!!!

When you interlink Twitter, LinkedIN, Facebook and your own Blog, strange things happen.

LinkedIN – ‘The Professionals Social Network’

The Social Networks drive traffic to your blog, that sends them back to your Social Networks. The referral web traffic is just huge! A single LinkedIN Group article posting (super targeted audience!) can bring hundreds of people within a day to your site, and literally thousands within a 30 day period. Remember it is only the people within that LinkedIN group who see that link to your site so you actually see the LinkedIN Profiles of your incoming web site traffic.

Twitter – ‘The Time Waster’

Whoever tells you that he knows how to use Twitter for anything business related is probably smarter than people who invented Twitter themselves. There is no Cook Book on how to use Twitter successfully. There are lot of eBooks on how to use Twitter, but none is promising ANY success. No one can tell you how will Twitter positively affect your revenue. Anyone who used Twitter can tell you how Twitter will kill your productivity!

The success in using Twitter or the successes we (heavy users – with lots of time invested in it) all had are all sporadic and completely unpredictable. We cannot really define why any of them happened. This is why Twitter usage is unpredictable, and the success path is less obvious than with any other social network.

Just be aware that Twitter as well as LinkedIN drives extremely targeted traffic to your site. So use it wisely. 140 characters (minus the length of your URL) is a very short message space!

Facebook – ‘My Private Life and just FUN!’

The European usage of Facebook greatly differs from the way they use it in the US. On our side of the ‘pond’ we use Facebook for fun. Your Friends and Family are in your Facebook contacts far more often that someone you do or plan to do business with.

Niche Social Networking Sites

There are a lot of industry specific networks, based most often on NING or similar platforms. Those as well give you a chance to drive their web traffic to your site, but publishing articles on those networks inviting the users to come and see more info on your own site. This is again targeted referral traffic – so the highest quality visitors that you can imagine.

Inbound Linking

One aspect of the usage of the Social Networking sites for building web traffic is to get the referral traffic from them. The other aspect is the inbound linking. If the links on those sites are ‘Clean Links’, meaning no redirects or the nofollow tag used – those are nice inbound links to your site. Since the search engines just love the social networking sites, especially the ones where the whole content is ‘open to them’ – meaning no user login is required to read all the pages, the links from those sites are very good form the search engine perspective. A good social networker will therefore use the social networks to get the referral traffic, and in the same time place lots of one way inbound links to his site.