SEO Consultant Ireland

Looking for an SEO Expert?

Or are you a SEO Expert yourself?

Not? Well everyone else seems to be? So what’s wrong with you?

In reality, everyone calls themselves a SEO Expert nowadays. There are no credentials required really. Most of us think that there is no experience really required. Kind of – you get up one day and decide – today, I will call myself a SEO Expert.

And the world all of the sudden seems so different to you. You are important professional now. People are very interested to hear what you have to say.

It feels great actually to become a SEO Expert all of the sudden. It is a life changing experience. You are invited as a speaker to pretty much any conference that you can think of. If you add a bit of the social networking in the mix of your expertise – you will have to run a busy schedule! You get invited to speak and are asked for quotes from the editors of the magazines you didn’t even know existed!

You can pick the projects you want to work on. Greed clouds your judgement and you tend to choose the SEO projects with the largest budgets. Months are passing, and your clients see no benefits from their investment in you – the SEO Expert of their choice!

Problems. Project cancelations. Clients asking their money back. You of course, the SEO Expert keep on explain them that it is either their fault or that SEO takes time.

In the meantime you are also realising what works in the sales process of the search engine optimization. It really is very cool how the phrases like

• First page in Google Guaranteed
• Page 1 ranking in 30 days

Open up the check books instantly. The Guarantee works somehow as the insurance to the buyer. It can only be a REAL SEO Expert offering 100% Money Back Guarantee, right?

Clients are piling up. There is a waiting list now. You think of the expansion. I should hire SEO staff to manage the demand! If the demand slows down a bit, you can always pour a few thousands in Google AdWords, and the hungry clients will come for your SEO Services.

Soon enough, this country is too small for you…. Expansion to Europe is on the cards. Or perhaps the Far East? Or should we do the IPO first?

Such is the life of the self proclaimed SEO Expert. Not easy really. Tough choices.

Read any good SEO books lately? No? Me neither.

Why is that?

SEO is evolving far too quick for the traditional book publishing process. If you have even been involved in book writing – you know well enough that it last for months if not a full year.

A year in ‘Internet Time’ is a long as a Geological Era really. Think about what the Internet looked like a year ago. Than one more year ago, than one more… and you can see Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, WordPress Blogs, Blogger, …. diapering.

If you start writing a SEO book today on you will write it from the today’s perspective (at best). The day the book gets published the data it describes will have more Historical value than the real one. You might as well call your SEO book: ‘Internet, as it once was…’.

To learn about the search engine optimization, do not try to find a magic SEO book that will teach you all. That SEO book does not exist. That SEO book cannot exist.

Read blogs. Like this one. Forget SEO books!

There are three basic stands you can chose when it comes to Online Marketing.

I don’t care about the Web!

You can simply chose to ignore it. Here are the reasons for it:
Your target market might not the using the Internet.
Your product or a service might not be applicable to be advertised online.
The scenarios above are less likely as days go by. So sooner or later you will have to face the fact. Internet is here!

I am monitoring it all!

Cybersleuth is by definition a person who searches the Internet for information about a company, both positive and negative, to keep abreast of public opinion by using the Web, Blogs and Social Networks.
This defines the ‘Passive’ activity on the Web. Cybersleuth absorbs information, cybersleuth is not a publisher.
Understanding your digital footprint is the core and the first step before you start managing it. You need to understand where you are, what the starting point is. You need to set your media marketing goals, and define a path how to get there from where you are.

Online Media Marketing Manager

Online Media Marketing Manager replaces the Cybersleuth with active publishing. Online Marketing is not just monitoring the media but actively publishing. Blogs, and Social Networks, Forums, Directories and all related web sites are the publishing tools. Your own web site is the main one tool an Online Marketing Manager has. Search engine optimization has the major role since it will help drive the publish to your site – traffic landing on the marketing messages you control and serve to your visitors.

Managing Search engine Results Pages (SERP) positioning of your site via the search engine optimization (SEO) most important task.

How to plan, start and organise your Social Media Marketing?

To market yourself you can use a number of online tools. Here are just the main ones:

1. Your web site
2. Your blog
3. Twitter
4. LinkedIN
5. Facebook

The list is endless. What will work for you might not be the best for everyone else. You need to understand where your target market ‘hangs out’, and use those sites.

Your Web site

Using one of those tools by itself is good. The true success in social media marketing is when you start combining them. Years ago, having a web site was enough. Then the search engines came and it was important that your web site is search engine optimised. Otherwise no one has seen it! Today, the number of optimised sites is so huge, and the size of the data published online that SEO itself is not enough anymore.

What become the powerful tool is the subscriptions to ezines and newsletters. You captured the web site visitor and he agreed to get an email whenever you decided to send one. It’s all great but we all started getting far too much mail we really wanted. As a publisher of a web site you always wanted to ‘talk’ to your visitors. Here comes ‘The Blog’…

Your Blog

Blogs are a bit magical from a number of aspects:
1. Interaction with the visitors via the blog comments is unique. The web site visitors can have their say on your web site! Unique.
2. RSS feed subscription enables everyone to subscribe to your updates and read them where and when they like, in a very manageable format.
3. From the search engine optimization perspective blogs are almost always performing better than your own web site. In majority of the cases a blog will attract a multiplication of the total number your own web site can attract.

Twitter

So what do you do with all your blog visitors now? You get them subscribed to your feed or at least on Twitter. The best exit path from your blog after the ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Subscribe’ (or whatever is a conversion on your site) is ‘Follow me on Twitter’.

LinkedIN

Let your visitors connect to you via LinkedIN. There you capture their name, phone, email and actually their whole professional life is logged there. It is quite easy to export your LinkedIN Contacts, and here is your perfect marketing list.

Facebook

Similar to Twitter as it is another permission based (marketing) message broadcasting channel. Facebook is more ‘feature rich’ compared to Twitter. Get your web and blog visitors to Connect to your on Facebook.

So why getting your web site visitors to the social networking sites to connect to you? Simply to capture their details, and enable them to start and engage in the conversation with you. You then use the social networks to advertise your new products, special offers, services… and back they come to your web site and your blog. The big red ‘Buy now’ button is jet again in front of them. And again, and again…

Any of the online marketing tools alone cannot achieve anything similar by itself. Your offering will determine what will you use, but you have to use either a web site or a blog, and you have to use at least one social network. The choice what to use will not be based on what you like, but based on what your target market is using .

Online marketers around the globe (particularly in the UK) are increasingly turning to search marketing tactics.
Fifty-five percent of respondents said they planned to raise spending on SEO, and 45% said the same of paid search.

In addition, 31% of SEO and 32% of paid search users said they intended to maintain their budgets.

Link building is usually considered as a part of the search engine optimization. The reason for it is that the search engines value links pointing to a web site. The text used to generate a link is called the Anchor Text, and the search engines associate your site with the keywords used in the links pointing to your site.

For example if there is a link on some web site pointing to yours, and the text used to generate the link is the phrase ‘fresh yogurt’ the search engine will associate our site with that phrase. As a result when someone is searching for the term ‘fresh Yogurt’ the search engine will display your site.

This demonstrates the ‘Power of Links’ on the web today. You need to gain links towards your web site where the link is the search phrase you want to rank well for in the SERP pages.

There are different methods of link building:
1. SPAM – you can run tools that scan web sites, scrap email addresses and send emails to those emails requesting the recipients to link to you. This is a fairly automated process and in most countries 100% illegal.
2. Paid and Free Directory Listings – you can search for the directories on the web that will let you list your web site. Most of those are what is today known as Link Farms. Some are still valuable.
3. Link Exchange – is the common name for emailing the site owners and webmasters with a proposal to include a link to your site with a counter proposal that you will (or have already) linked to them.
4. Purchasing Links – A number of online marketing companies act as Link Brokers reselling the links from one web site to another. Most often between the clients of the same agency.
5. Social Bookmarking – is submitting links to the long list of the social bookmarking sites. This is extremely valuable technique if done right.
6. Blog Commenting – most of blogs let you leave comments that will also include a link back to your site if you place it. The NOFALLOW Tag is also a common practice telling the search engines NOT to give importance to those links.
7. Link Magnet – is generating the content on your own web site that is so good, interesting and relevant that people naturally link to it from their own web sites. This is also called sometimes Link Baiting that just proves my earlier these that the search engine optimization is like fishing!

Each of the link building approaches, with the exception of pure SPAM-ing, is extremely labour intensive and time consuming. Creativity is usually one of the most effective skills of a good and effective link builder. Understanding the local market also helps that much that outsourcing of link building to a cheaper countries in most cases does not give good results.

A single link from a blog article placed in the right moment (first comment) can generate literally thousands of direct visitors. Knowing what blogs to spend time on is the key of the link building success when it comes to blog commenting.

Like in professional sailing race where a number of skills are required to get to the top position. The difference is that Link Building is mostly like a single handed racing. There is usually just one ‘crew’, a opposed to the team like the one of the Green Dragon in the Volvo Ocean Race. This is why a link builder needs to be supper efficient since there are so many tasks to do and all of them are extremely time consuming.

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 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.

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.

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.