SEO Consultant Ireland

Some blogs are funny!
Some blogs tell you the story! – about the topic you are interested in
Some blogs are informative!
Some blogs carry interesting opinions!
Some blogs give you kicks!

But some blogs are not really good. Not good at all.

What makes a good blog?

What makes you read blogs? You can read things you will never be able to read in any ‘official’ publication. Blogs and any other ways of the users contributed content like the social networks, bring the personality of the people in their postings. And that is what makes the majority of the blogs interesting. You really see the world trough someone else’s eyes.

What makes a bad blog?

Edgar Allan Poe wrote once:

We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake [...] and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: — but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.

And this is exactly how some of the blogs are constructed. Tons of words, miles of sentences, and a meaning lost somewhere in between all that content. When you read a blog post on such a blog you get to the end, realise you did not really understand what was it about actually, and hind your eyes glazing into the title and the first sentences to try to get that word you think you skipped reading and it took away the whole meaning of the article. But that key word is not there. It never was. There never was any meaning. The blog is just written to acquire traffic. The blog is just the huge mass of the content submitted to the search engine to attract audience. Any audience. It’s…

L’blog pour l’blog

You can sense the pain the author went through to craft the sentences to find the words to fill the gaps between the predefined keywords. You can sense the lack of overall idea, sometimes even the styles vary from one sentence to the other that is stolen from another author. L’blog pour l’blog has a unique content, and absolutely no meaning, no message for you. We call it a splog since it is a pure spam fed to the search engines to attract the long tail searches.

L’blog pour l’blog leaves a bitter taste in the mouth after you leave it. L’blog pour l’blog is a ‘Bounce Magnet’ since you will leave it from the same page you have landed, rarely clicking on anything else there. L’blog pour l’blog attracts traffic left right and centre and makes money for the advertiser in some extremely low click through way. Huge organic traffic + low CTR = some survival revenue. And an opportunity missed. And opportunity to capture the visitor with a high quality content. To convert the visitor to the subscriber, and a buyer eventually.

L’blogging pour l’blogging….

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!).

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.

http://www.irishjobsinireland.com/

How important is a domain name for your web site?
Hat impact will the presence of the important search phrases within your domain name have on your web traffic?
Is it important to have a search phrases in the domain name?

All interesting questions. The SEO gurus disagree completely on this, so here are the findings of the real life test of the site: http://www.irishjobsinireland.com/.

Here is a site that has a very descriptive domain name: Irish Jobs in Ireland. It contains the phrases Irish Jobs, and Jobs in Ireland. A site is published about a year ago. The site has some content as well. The number of sites are linking to it, so both Google and Yahoo visit it from time to time.

After a year the Google PR is still 0.

For the phrase: Irish Jobs in Ireland it is only on the 8th spot in Google.ie. For the Irish Jobs or Jobs in Ireland… it is not on the first page.

The concussion is that the search phrase in the domain name helps, but alone cannot do anything meaningful to your web site traffic from the search engines.

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.

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.