SEO Consultant Ireland

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.

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.

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.

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

Analysing a large an numerical data is much easier if displayed in graphs that highlight the important data. The use of images and colors enables us to see much more than just looking into the raw tables with just numbers.

An Image tells a thousand words.

Imagine is you could look into your Google Webmaster Tools data in some Visual Ranking Reporting Tool as opposed to the boring and hard to grasp numerical tables?

Every SEO professional is asking himself the same questions:

Where is my site ranked in Google for a keyword?
Is my ranking going up or down?
What keywords do I show up for in Google, and is my ranking increasing or decreasing trough time?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have our data presented in such way in Google Webmaster Tools?

“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.

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?

There are two major approaches when optimising a web site for the search engine:

1. Low hanging fruit
When a web site is being optimised for a search phrase that almost no other web site is optimised for (at least not intentionally) it is usually fairly easy to get super high ranking super fast. Take a 3 or 4 word search phrase and you can rank almost any web site high for it in no time. The approach is called a ‘Low Hanging Fruit’ since you can really easy get the ‘juice’ (traffic) out to the search engine for a very long phrase.

2. Big Boys SEO
Optimising a web site for a highly used single word search phrase like Cars, Jobs, Travel or Insurance, is the other end of the search engine optimisation. It does differ quite a lot from optimising a web site for a multiple words phrases. Usually far more statistical analysis are utilised. A very definite and precise methodologies are required. Why? Simply because you are not the only one in the playing field here. All your competitors will be optimising for the same keyword. The time required for a decent ranking result is very long, and no stellar success is to be expected. Search engine results pages do not change that much for the single word search phrases at all. Some single words when entered in the search engine generate the same search results listed in the same order for many months!

Should you optimise a web site for a single words phrases or for a multiple words search phrases? The following statistics published by OneStat.com will help you:

The 7 most used word phrases in search engines on the web are:

1. - 2 word phrases - 32.58%
2. - 3 word phrase - 25.61%
3. - 1 word phrases - 19.02%
4. - 4 word phrases - 12.83%
5. - 5 word phrases - 5.64%
6. - 6 word phrases - 2.32%
7. - 7 word phrases - 0.98%

Two word phrases are the most used search phrases in the search engines. And now even more surprising to the most of us is the fact that the three word phrases are closely following! Only then do a single word phrases come in the picture with less than one fifth if the overall traffic. Having a insurance web site listed 1st in Google for the word ‘Insurance’ will only bring one fifth of the (possible) traffic for that single word listing. Optimising your pages forthe two and search phrases containing two and three keywords will bring the majority of the traffic to any web site.

What is WordPress
WordPress is an free open source blogging platform. There are a quite a few free open source blogging platforms, but WordPress seems like the most popular and the most used. Everyone can contribute to the WordPress code. If there is a new ‘Look & Feel’ developed it is called a WordPress Theme. There are literally thousands of them available on the web today. If there is a functional update to the WordPress code it can be distributed as a WordPress Plugin. Anyone can download WordPress and any theme or plugin freely and use it for both personal and commercial use.

WordPress is easy
WordPress is designed so that no technical knowledge is required to install it and use it. It doesn’t even ask you to many stupid question during the install but what do you want to call your web site and what your email is. And most of us can answer that. The amount of the customization that is available is as well quite impressive, and the interface is intuitive. So really, anyone can use it.

WordPress is constantly upgraded
The last WordPress update made available is about two weeks ago only. It gets better and better every few weeks. The amount of plugins growing exponentially as well, so it is unlikely you will find a web site functionality that is not ‘developed’ before.

WordPress is a SEO Killer!
And here we get to the interesting part now. The applications of WordPress are really numerous even in the business use, not only as a blogging tool. Imagine the following scenario:

You are the used car salesman. You have a garage with 50 to 100 cars in it. 20 to 40 cars are sold each month and the same number of new ones come in. It is 21 century and you know you need to advertise on the Internet. Those lazy white collar people will not just walk in trough the front door. They will use the web to find their new car. What will they search for? What is the keyword they will type?

Car –to many results – all irrelevant.
Used cars – better but I am looking for a Saab!
Used cars Saab – good results, but it is the Automatic I am looking for
Used cars Saab automatic – ah, here we are… but let me try….
Used car Saab Automatic Black Leather 2l low mileage – Got it!

If you are a car salesman the only thing you need to sell that Saab is to place a link to the YOUR advertisement on the web that will display on top of the search for the exact phrase that describes that car. That is the buyer you want, you do not need his wife who has an idea about the Estate version!

Here is where WordPress comes into play. WordPress is a tool that can if set up properly and used properly place your advertisement on top of the exact search your buyers are looking for. You will get more relevant phone enquiries as well. There will be less:

Do you sell good Volvos?

And will be more like:

That Saab that you have advertised, the automatic 2 litre Petrol one. Do you still have it?

WordPress is a SEO springboard for almost any business.

The right time to start planning your SEO Strategy is before you start the development of your web site. The SEO Strategy has to be taken into account while developing the site. Applying the SEO to the finished site will take more time and resources. It will waste your money. In some cases it will actually be more cost effective to build the completely new site, but this time with the SEO Strategy aspects in mind.

Your SEO Strategy needs to be based on the type of the site you are building. Some sites are likely to get (inbound) links to them and some are not. If your site is one of those that get the inbound links naturally (directories etc) you should evaluate if the inbound links should point to the main (home) page of your site – or would you be better off with ‘deep’ links that are theme based. If your site is not the natural “link magnet”, you need to think of the way to encourage webmasters to link to you.

The Content
The content is your best bet in the search engine optimisation. The qualities of the content that Google values are:

quantity
unique
fresh
well formatted – with keywords standing out

To rank your content high in Google it needs to be:

broken down in the separate pages
the right keyword density per page
Each page optimized for one or two keywords only
The unique TITLE Tag on each page – that contains the keyword the page is optimised for
The unique set of META Keywords Tags – containing the keywords the page is optimised for and more
The unique META Description Tags – containing,… you get it by now, don’t you?

Google is a bit like an accountant, it counts the words in various ways. You need to get the words in your web pages to get ranked for them. It is this basic fact that people forget.

The Links
When you have developed your site, filled it with your content, and applied all the on page optimisation, it is the time to tell the Google about it. Or the on page sitemap or the one submitted directly to Google is the starting point only. The key part of your SEO Strategy needs to be the way of obtaining the inbound links. Exchanging the links is a way for some sites, but the most of the sites your content quality will need to act as a link bait from the other web sites. The higher quality of the content the larger likelihood you will attract inbound links.

Diversifying your content is the best way to increase the chances of getting the inbound links. There needs to be something for everyone (in your target market). Naming your articles you have a way of controlling the text the inbound links will link to you with (anchor text), so here your keywords come again.

It is the combination of this onsite search engine optimisation and offsite optimisation, that is building links to your site that generates the results. One alone, even if perfect will not get any site ranked high.

Oh yes, choose your keywords before doing anything else! This is the most common mistake, not to do the proper in depth keywords analysis before you start planning your SEO Strategy.