SEO Consultant Ireland

The mystery around the search engine optimization is slowly disappearing, but the large proportion of the online marketing people are still not quite sure what exactly the search engine optimization is. There are still people who are 100% hooked in the META Tags (and meta tags only!). There is a lot of people who still think it is about a few tricks here and there on your web site. What is good is that there is fortunately less and less marketers that still want to throw the search engine optimization to their IT department. Or even better on the outsourced IT website development company!

I read somewhere a comparison of the search engine optimization and a weight loss:

Search engine optimization as a weight loss takes time. No quick fixes available.

You need to make changes to your site and to your diet. No changes made, and sometimes drastically changes, no (rank) gain or (weight) loss.

You must be in it for a long term.

‘One size fits all’ product does not exist. As our bodies are different, our habits (how much do you eservice each day?), the web sites are different. The web sites compete in the different markets, where some are crowded and some are there to be taken easily. The search engine optimization packages like Bronze, Silver & Gold will do no good to the 95% of the web sites. It will do no harm, but also you will not see any measurable improvement in your revenue after investing in those once of ‘Perfect Fit’ search engine optimization packages.

Understanding is the key to success. What you eat and how much of it, and how much do you exercise is the basics of any weight loss program that will deliver a result. Having a proper content on the site correctly ‘presented’ to the search engine, with the correct amount of links to your site from the ‘important’ sites to your market is the key to success. The rest is just marketing and packaging of eh search engine optimization service. The rest is a vocabulary of the sales man.

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.

Is your Content management System (CMS) search engine optimised (SEO)?

Here is a short check list to help you answer the question:

1. URL Rewriting
Long gone are the days where there was gibberish in the web addresses or the URLs. Funnily enough all content management systems still work with those long and complex URLs. The smart CMS-es today have a built in URL Rewriting. What does it do? It changes your URL from the gibberish looking long one to something that looks like http://domain-name/page-title. It is nice to read to both the search engine and to human. It is also memorable as opposed to the long strings of numbers and symbols. When used properly, by placing the search keywords in the parts of the URL like the domain name itself and the title of the page, a great search engine optimisation results are achieved.
2. Dynamic Title Tag
Title is a HTML tag of a huge importance in relation to the search engine optimisation of each of your page. Notice the word ‘each’ here highlighted. Since there is very little sense in having two pages on the same web site with the same title. If your CMS does not let you create the unique title tag to every single page, your web site will not be very well optimised.
3. Dynamic Meta Tags
Meta Keywords and Meta Description are the two met tags important for the search engine optimisation. As well as the title tag, if your CMS should allow the author to define the both Meta Keywords and Meta Description uniquely for each page. Note that search engine often use the Meta Description as a description of your page displayed next to the link in their search engine results pages. Therefore it is vital to write a Meta Description ‘inviting’ the surfer to click on your listing.
4. H1, H2 Styles
Search engines assign ‘higher importance’ to words used in the top highlighted styles on the page. Placing your main keywords in those styles is crucial part of the onsite search engine optimisation. If your CMS does not let you control what text gets displayed in what style your web pages will not be well optimised for the search engines.

The list actually goes on and on. Image names and Alt Tags of the images, link structures of the internal links are also very important. The problem with the content management systems is really in drawing the line between the features that will help the user in using them quickly and easily, and allowing the user to control the code of the web site. That line is hard to place, and the result is that most of the content management system simply fail since they do not find the way how to give a lot of control to the end user, while making the user interface and the usage in general easy to learn and to use day by day. From the SEO perspective, there should be as much control as possible of the final code, but from the usability point it is the opposite. A good user interface for the CMS should be easy to use and let you control the above points easily as well.