SEO Consultant Ireland

Where to host a web site?
What hosting company?
What country to host a web site?
What hosting platform to choose?
Microsoft Hosting? Linux Hosting?
What hosting package to choose?
What optional add-ons like backup, secure server, domain name,. …. do I need?

All those are the questions you will need to answer when you decide to publish your web site. Some of those answers will have an impact on your SEO as well, like the location, and the domain name.

The most important thing you have to read is the small print from your hosting company! Here is the real life example, how you can get seriously scr…d up by a hosting company. And we are not talking about any ‘Two Boys in the Shed’ company, but one of the largest if not the largest hosting company in Ireland – Register365, purchased last year by even bigger player in the UK Namesco.

Register365 decided to ‘Upgrade’ their services, and the result is that the prices are drastically higher, and they also included a handy feature of not letting you send the outgoing mail. So if you are like the most of us, but also use the email, Register365 will kindly let you receive your email on your PC. But not send any mail yourself!? They will kindly explain that you can send mail via their provided web mail, or use some other mail server to send your email. Or,… yes there is also an option to ‘Purchase’ the ‘Email sending option’ that costs roughly just about the same as your hosting package.

Almost every hosting package or every hosting company has its benefits and drawbacks. There probably is no perfect hosting package. You need to decide what do you really need, how will you use it, and then talk to the customers of the company you are considering to use for your hosting needs. The best people to talk to is the ones who have various accounts with many different hosting companies. Search blogs for reviews, search forums and any social media for the honest reviews and discussions.

When you make a shortlist of the hosting companies you are considering – get into their small print. Hosting365 was really a great company, and probably a largest shared hosting company at the time they have been purchased by Namesco and rebranded as Register365. It was great! But obviously not so great if you also intend to send email…

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.

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.

There are mixed opinions about Alexa, but here is a quite unique feature Alexa can provide about a geographic market. If you plan to do any online marketing that is country or a region specific, you need to understand that market as best as you can. Alexa offers you a list of the most popular web sites for each country. Priceless knowledge if used right!

Here is the example of the Top Web Sites visited by people in Ireland

If you had enough of reading about SEO, that is supposed to be so simple and easy, and jet somehow does not happen with YOUR site, here is an easy way out! The PPC World of Google AdWords. Here is the Table of Contents of the Whitepaper published earlier this year (see About section for the authors).

I only got the short sample but an interesting chart in it already about the Irish PPC market. It is the breakdown of the industries that people are using PPC most (Does it give you an idea what your next AdSense rich Blog should be about?). If you have the full copy of the whitepaper, I would not mind reading more about the PPC, so send it on!

Ireland Search Engine Marketing Report 2008
April, 2008

The research has been supported by the Irish Direct Marketing Association (IDMA) and the Irish Internet Association (IIA).

Table of Contents

1. About E-consultancy 4
2. About research sponsors 4
2.1 About ICAN 4
2.2 About Cybercom 5
2.3 About Interactive Return 5
2.4 About RingJohn 5
3. Executive Summary and Highlights 6
4. Introduction 8
4.1 Introduction by ICAN 8
4.2 Methodology and Sample 9
4.2.1 Methodology 9
4.2.2 Turnover 10
4.2.3 Business Sector 10
4.2.4 Is search done in-house or by an agency? 11
5. Survey Results 12
5.1 Budgets 12
5.1.1 Percentage of total marketing budget spent online 12
5.1.2 Breakdown of online marketing budget by digital channel 13
5.1.3 Search engine marketing budget split 14
5.1.4 Do you expect budgets to increase or decrease? 15
5.1.5 Search engine marketing spend 16
5.1.6 How much are search budgets going up? 17
5.1.7 Allocation of paid search spending 18
5.2 Objectives and effectiveness 19
5.2.1 Primary objectives from search engine marketing 19
5.2.2 Relative importance of paid search and SEO on brand 20
5.2.3 How digital channels rate for return on investment 21
5.2.4 Return on investment (ROI) from Search 22
5.2.5 Tracking return on investment from Search 23
5.2.6 Effectiveness of ROI tracking 24
5.2.7 Use of web analytics tools 24
5.2.8 Rising click costs (CPC) 25
5.3 Search Engines 26
5.3.1 Search engines used for PPC 26
5.3.2 Best search engines for ROI 27
5.3.3 Is dominance of Google a threat? 28
5.4 Search problems and issues 29
5.4.1 Paid Search problems 29
5.4.2 SEO problems 30
5.4.3 Availability of training 31
6. Market overview 32
6.1 Market valuation and growth 32
6.1.1 Key sectors 33
6.2 Market trends 34
6.2.1 Advertisers seize opportunities as market matures 34
6.2.2 Search advertisers get more savvy as competition increases 35
6.2.3 Polarisation between sophisticated and unsophisticated 37
6.2.4 Google dominates as other search engines fail to step up 38
6.3 Barriers to digital marketing growth 41
6.3.1 Slow uptake of broadband 41
6.3.2 Traditional mindset of marketers 41
6.3.3 Skills gap and lack of understanding 41
6.3.4 Lack of transparency in market 42
6.3.5 Other barriers 42

SEO Consultant first in Google Chrome!

It took about 6 months from the web site launch to get it to the first position in Google for ‘pages in Ireland’.

SEO Keywords in Ireland – By Google Keyword Tool (July, 2008)

“Growing up”, Google learned to understand the abbreviations. Today it knows that ‘SEO’ stands for ‘Search Engine Optimization’. You can see it in the search engine results pages where Google highlights the keyword you have made a search for in the text description it displays about your site. So if you make a search for ‘SEO’, it will highlight the text ‘Search Engine Optimization’ as well.

What is to be noted here is that this is actually wrong. Why? Because this is a search results page of the Google.ie, so it should have the Irish spelling here. Note that there is also a text there ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ – the way we spell it here in Ireland. The Google.ie didn’t highlight that, meaning it didn’t understand that this means SEO as well.

Someone should teach Google.ie the Irish spelling of the English words…

Until then, watch your META Description Tags. If you want Google to understand you and display and highlight appropriately, you need to spell the full meanings of the abbreviations the American way. Otherwise Google will not recognise them, and will not display / highlight them properly in the search engine results pages.

Some three months ago I wrote the post about the speed of Google – defining a test on how long does Google really take to place a new web site high (first page) for the relevant search phrases. We all know that Google will fairly quickly display a web site high in the search engine results pages (SERP) after it initially finds the page – for the search phrase that is exactly the same as the domain name of the web page. But getting listed for the other keywords is something that Google really does not rush to do quickly. Exceptions are of course pages PING’ed directly to Google, or submitted via the XML Sitemaps. But both of those tend to have a short ‘life span’ high in the SERP.

So three months after the publishing of this site SeoConsultant.ie – the Google Webmaster Console is showing its rankings in the SERP:

Note that all those results are still obtained with the ‘Pages from Ireland’ option selected for those search phrases.

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?