SEO Consultant Ireland

What is the best SEO Software?

That is a question I get asked from almost every client. Jet I never really know how to answer that question. Why is that?

There are number of the SEO tools I have used and still use a number of them, depending on the site I am optimising. I wrote about a number of the SEO Tools on this site, and Hubspot is the one I use for a long time. They keep coming out with a new tools, relevant to the new things that happen on the web. Hubspot Twitter Grader is just another fine example!

I Wrote about the Stompernet Site Seer, a whole list of Google SEO tools like Google Webmaster Tools, KeywordSpy and many others.

But to answer the question – What is the best SEO Software, I simply cannot. I just realized I never even wrote a blog post about a single SEO Sofware package. Is WebCEO, SEOElite, Internet Business Promoter (IBP), SEO Suite, SEO Studio, and a long list of other SEO Software packages really not worth an article?

Well in all fairness they surely are! But each of them will cover a few task SEO specialist does, and try to automate the process in completing those tasks. Most of the SEO Software does a great job.

The unfortunate fact is that there is no SEO Software that does it all even for one type of the web site. I actually use Excel and Notepad more than any purpose built SEO Software.

HubSpot is definitely a company everyone in the online marketing world should watch closely! I wrote about them before, and still use their Grader products.

I got a preview of the new book by: Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, both co-founders of HubSpot: Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs (The New Rules of Social Media). A great read really. Since the in my ‘past life’ I was into the recruitment and jobs, it was really interesting to read the part about the Recruitment of the Marketing Team. Here is a short snippet:

What does this change mean for your marketing staff? Simply put, your hiring
criteria need to change and your way of measuring performance needs to change
along with it. The following is a suggested framework called DARC for hiring and
developing inbound marketing savvy employees.

• D = Hire Digital Citizens
• A = Hire for Analytical chops
• R = Hire for Web Reach
• C = Hire Content Creators

They also wrote a long list of the handy questions for the recruiters hiring Inbound marketing staff. The list is really, really good:

• What RSS reader do you use? Can you show it to me?
• What blogs do you read?
• Do you rank first for your name in Google?
• Do you use Delicious? Can you show it to me?
• Do you have a blog? Can you show it to me?
• Do you use Facebook or LinkedIn? When was the last time you updated
  your profile?
• Do you use Twitter? Can you show me?
• Do you have a channel on YouTube? Can you show it to me?

Interview questions about the Reach:

• How many subscribers to your blog? Do you talk about our industry on
  your blog or about personal stuff?
• How many Facebook followers do you have? Do you talk about our
  industry at all on your Facebook account?
• How many LinkedIn followers do you have?
• How many Twitter followers?

The writing style is extremely light. A complete novice to the digital marketing should have no problems following the book. There are tons of good tips, pointing a reader on how to organise the Inbound Marketing team in the eBook itself. Well worth reading!!!!

Any Business Plan has to include a Marketing Plan of some sort. For the Internet based businesses our Marketing Plan will most likely be one of the main sections. When it comes to writing the Online Marketing Budget, the whole list of problems start. Why is that?

Pay Per Click Budget

Online Marketing people will like budgeting for the PPC. Why? Simply because the cost of the PPC is predictable. And the whole PPC business is accountable (if you build in the Click Fraud in your formula somewhere). There is a cost per click, and volumes, and targets and markets… lots of figures you can work with – something an accountant will love.

SEO Budget

Where is where serious question marks are raised under the accountants head! What is the budget required for the search engine optimisation? What is the units, deliverables, and values of each? With SEO it’s all far less specified and defined than with the PPC. And SEO also consists of so many areas that it might be defined very differently by various vendors. The needs for the SEO are very different by every client.

I want to be #1 in Google!

In most cases marketing people with little online experience will have serious issues when defining the Budget for the SEO in their Marketing Plan. They will ask the SEO Experts, and base their SEO Budget on the quotes from the SEO Vendors. Most likely their definition of their SEO Marketing Goals will be – We want to be #1 in Google for …! In other words, they will tell the SEO Companies nothing really relevant that is needed to create a plan of actions and analyze the market and keywords in question to be able to establish the real amount of the work required – hence the cost of it. Ballpark figures and even figures completely imagined are therefore quite common in SEO. People ordering SEO Service do not understand what part of their Marketing Plan do they HAVE to disclose for the SEO Company to give back the realistic estimate.

What’s the cost of SEO?

Marketing people with no online marketing experience usually call the SEO Companies and simply ask – What’s the cost of SEO? The tendency is to disclose as little as possible of their real needs. With a bit of shopping around – hey choose the Best SEO Offer. Not asking themselves much why do the SEO offers differ so much and why does one vendor charge sometimes 100 times more than the other. Not 100% more, 100 times more!

The reason is that the one ordering the SEO service needs to understand the exact deliverables of the SEO web site optimisation. Understanding the tasks involved in the web site optimization work also greatly helps. Understanding the whole process and timelines – well that defines the Perfect Client for SEO!

Unfortunately that is almost never the case.

Those who understand SEO tend to find time to do it all themselves.

Irish web development companies are giving away a free SEO services to their clients.

Sounds like a dream?

In most cases it is not really free as advertised. In most cases it is a free SEO package offered to the clients who purchase a web site from a web development company. Another approach that web development companies take is to offer a free SEO service as a ‘Draw’. To enter a draw, they will ask you to send them an email, or fill a questionnaire online where they will ask you all about your company, and your marketing and SEO budget. A bit like the shops ask you to reveal a bit of your privacy, and take their shopping card so that they can understand your shopping habits, usually for a bunch of vouchers worth up to 1% of your purchases.

It is a nice way of collecting leads for the web development companies selling SEO services, and if marketed properly it generates good leads and business as a result.

Here is an example of Irish web development ICAN giving away a free SEO service and advertising it currently via Google AdWords in IIA web site Blog.

Free SEO anyone?

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.

The PPC Market in Ireland is as the most industries hit hard in the last months. The bit price (CPC) for the huge range of keywords is just gone wild. The clicks are either

Extremely expensive (CPC)
That is a sign of many advertisers biding for the keyword they think is important for their business. In some cases it might be just the two advertisers having their private price war.

Unexpected big drops (in CPC)
Some keywords show huge cost per click drops, and become cheep. That is mostly the result of the big player (the big AdWords spender or a number of them) leaving the marketplace, usually with their marketing budget all spend for the period, and the keywords CPC price drops drastically.

The overall size of the Irish PPC market seems to be shrinking during early 2009. Both Google AdWords and Google AdSense publishers can see it clearly. Recession is here, and is here to stay with us for some time. It is having the impact on the online marketing and the PPC budgets are suffering in this volatile market.

When you manage to capture your web site visitors, understanding how you did it is extremely important to base your future efforts on how to grow your web site traffic. Here are the basic questions you need to answer for each of your visitors:

Where did he came from?
What search phrase he used?
Where did he land on your web site?

The free questions above are the key of understanding your traffic. I lots of cases you will have to drill down further and answer questions like:

Where geographically is your web site visitor from?
What was your rank in the SERP for the phrase he was searching for?
How was your site represented in the SERP for the search phrase he was searching for?
Where did he go on your site?
Where did he go next?
How long was he on the site?

We all know that Google Analytics is the most used online web site log analyzer today. It is free, and Google is ingesting a lot in improving it constantly. But anyone who used it knows very well that although it is probably the best overall service it still lacks the capability to answer half of the questions listed above.

The result is that if you really want to understand your visitors you will have to use multiple web log analyzers. Especially if you have an active site where the content is dynamic and ever changing you will require a real time display of the activity on your web site to understand what do people actually read, when and why. The same article published in the different times of the day will not attract the same numbers of visitors. That and number of similar situations is where you are 100% helpless with just Google Analytics since it’s data is really far from real time, and is not even intended for such use (it is best used as an overview of the historical data).

There are number of tools that can help you to work with the real time data. You can analyse your raw log files yourself with software packages like WebTrends, or you can use the online services. There is a long list of them and each has a number of nice features so your choice will depend on what exactly are you looking for. The online web site visitors tracking services are usually free to begin with and then paid for when your traffic grows.

The ones I can recommend are StatCounter and the one with interesting features for bloggers is FEEDJIT.

As in fishing the search engine optimization is done before you see any results. Whatever you use to catch your fish you do need to make your gear wet before you will catch a single fish. In SEO you need to write your copy (bait), publish it to the search engines (sink it). If your bait is good (interesting content represented in the search engine with a interesting title and a sentence below it), and you place it where there are a lot of fishes (top of the rankings for your relevant search phrases) you will catch a lot (of visitors to your web site).

So what is your bait stinks?

In the SEO worlds your bait is the representation of your web site in the search engine.

The page TITLE tag is the most important since it is printed in the top line of your sites listing and is also a link to your site. This needs to be catchy, and inviting.

The META is the place to write your tag lines and marketing messages, since this text displays often as a next two lines of the site listing in the search engine results page.

URL is the bottom line of your sites listing and if your domain name, or the further directory and or filenames have sense your site listing will attract more visitors. People will simply click more on your link in the search engines.

Note that the search engines, and Google does this as well, prints the words a visitor have used in the search phrase bold on the search result page. How to use this feature to your advantage? Use the keywords you want visitors for in your Title META and on your text on the page. Google will do the rest for you. It will bold each instance of the each keyword searched for in the search results page, highlighting those searched keywords wherever those are found in the results. It is a nice usability feature, and Google obviously uses it. Remember they have Jakub Nielsen in the Board!

What if your fishing gear stinks?

You created your page with a relevant, interesting and inviting page TITLE. Your META description is beautiful and sounds like a most expensive marketing message and you made your URLs readable like a text. Great! Fishes are biting! Visitors are clicking on your listings in the search results pages like crazy. You have lots of visitors and all of them are flowing to your site free from the search engines. Then again, your sales (if you are selling directly on the site) are absolutely flat. The fish are biting but you don’t bring anything home!?

Your fishing gear is your landing page. You have the fish here, and you need to get it out of the water. If your gear is not mach for the fish, you will lose it. The same is with our web site visitors. If they do not find exactly what they have been looking for on your site they will leave.

So what exactly are your visitors that came from the search engines looking for?

Remember that you have actually brought those visitors to our site. Google cannot send you the visitors by itself. You need to write, publish, and link to your site so that the Google can find your content and bring you the fish. Oops no. The visitors. Right.

Your bait worked. Your site listing in the search results page was relevant to the search phrase the visitor used and your TITLE meta and the URL invited the visitor to visit your site. What is he looking for? He is looking for EXACTLY what you wrote in your TITLE, META (or the snippet of your page text copy) and the URL. To make the visitor stay on the page you need to have the content on that page that the visitor is looking for. It sounds simple but isn’t always so in the real life. What this tells you actually is the old SEO rule that says that every page of the web site should have a unique TITLE. And the next step, if you want to convert that visitor – make sure he does not leave immediately (bounce), you need to have the exact match of the page TITEL and META description with the content of each page. Yes it means the unique META Description, just in case you have been wondering (or the fish is gone!).

The world of internet marketing is changing. Where are those banners from the ’90-ies? Google made a revolution with its AdWords pay per click programme that dominates the internet advertising market. No other competitor actually ever came close to the Google’s AdWords. The predictions for the future are further growth, in this booming industry.

One thing caught my eye, and that is the comparison of the search volume of the two abbreviations the pay per click – PPC and the search engine optimization – SEO. PPC was dominant but SEO was catching up in the last couple of years. In the last couple of months it is actually hard to separate the two keywords. It just shows the growing importance and awareness of the search engine optimization in the internet marketing world.

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.