SEO

Search Engine Optimization is like….

Posted on January 23, 2009 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Search Engine Optimisation, SEO 3 Comments

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.

SEO caught up with PPC!

Posted on November 17, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in SEO 5 Comments

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.

Beginner Tips for SEO

Posted on November 12, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Google, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO 1 Comment

Network Solutions Sr VP; Beginner Tips for SEO

MSNBC SEO Consultant’s Corner

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.

Search Phrase in the Domain Name

Posted on October 19, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in SEO 1 Comment

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.

Search Engine Optimization Cost

Posted on October 3, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, SEM, SEO, SEO Consultant 5 Comments

The most common question I get is:

How much does the search engine optimization cost?

The cost of SEO is in most cases far greater than the majority of those who asked me imagined. For some reason there is a huge percentage of people who not only think but are convinced that they should be able to get on top of the search results in Google, for next to nothing. The majority of those who had their web site designed by a younger family member or some student for a bit of cash, really strongly believe that the cost of search engine optimization should be the fraction of what they paid for the web site.

I wrote in a post SEO Budget, about the search engine optimization costs and how to estimate it.

Search Engine Optimization Cost is Determined by YOUR Marketing Goals

Do you need 100 or a 1000 visitors to look at your web site every day? The difference is 10 times in those two examples. The search engine optimization cost will be almost 10 times different to achieve those two marketing goals.

How Many Web Site Visitors do You Need?

Calculate your web site conversion rate. Let’s take it for example that you need 100 web site visitors to make one sale. Your conversion rate is therefore 1%. Now, how many sales do you want to make every day? 50 Sales? 50 sales times 100 visitors per sale equals 5000 unique visitors a day. You can calculate it for your site with the same formula.

Web Site Revenue

Now let’s take web site revenue into the equation as well. Imagine your revenue is 100 per sale. 50 sales from 5000 visitors a day with the conversion rate of 1% is 5000 a day. Note that if you manage to change the conversion rate for just 1% higher, to 2% your revenue doubles to 10000 with the same 5000 visitors, and therefore the same search engine optimisation cost.

What is your Profit per Sale?

Let’s say that your sales costs eat half of the revenue and your profit is 50. 50 sales a day and your profit is 50 on each make the daily profit of 2500.

Now let’s look at those figures on the annual basis. We had a web site with 5000 visitors with 1% conversion rate. Each sale is worth 100, and sales cost deducted the profit per sale is 50.

1 day: 50 sales of 100 each make 5000 in revenue with 2500 profit.
1 year: 18250 sales of 100 each make 1825000 in revenue with 912500 profit.

The number of unique visitors was 5000 a day so therefore 1825000 visitors in the whole year.

What is the cost of a visitor?

The cost of a visitor in search engine optimization is a theoretical figure. The cost per visitor can only be calculated in the search engine marketing terms. In the example above where there is 912500 a year profit and we know that to make that profit we require 1825000 visitors, we can simply divide the required number of visitors by the profit (marketing budget in SEM terms) and get a cost of a visitor of 0.5. That number is a defining number if the search engine marketing can or cannot be used to drive traffic to our site. If the traffic can be bought for less than 0.5 the business will be profitable. If the average visitor costs more than 0.5, the business will be in red by the end of the year.

As well as the cost of the visitor from the search engine marketing perspective, from the search engine optimisation perspective we can calculate the value of a web site visitor. It is again the same in the sample above 0.5.

How to determine the search engine optimization cost?

In the sample above there is 1.8 mil visitors required to generate 0.9 million in profit. If spread evenly during the year this means we need 5000 visitors a day. Divide the profit by the number of visitors per day and you get the value of each daily visitor of 182.5. This means that if you can pay your search engine optimisation less than 182.5 per the single unique visitor a day you will be making profit. If you are paying more you will end up in red.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Costs Vs. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Costs

NOTE: See the post about: Search Engine Optimisation vs. Search Engine Marketing.

Let’s get back to the beginning and compare the business running with investing in SEO and in SEM. You know your market so ask yourself a question:

Is it likely I will be able to pay 0.5 per click (per visitor) for a sale worth 100?

In my opinion there are not that many examples where this is possible. Now let’s look at the SEO avenue, and ask yourself if you know of a SEO company who will bring your 5000 unique visitors for 0.9 million? Now I know many SEO companies that would do it in many markets.

And now the fun part. Year 1 ended. The second you stop paying your SEM your business is on the flat line. With SEO the truth is that on the last day of year on and the first day on year two you will make the same profit, without paying anything for SEO. The search engine optimisation investment is a long term investment. When you build you rankings and inbound links, you will not really lose that traffic that quickly. At the end of the second year, you will even without investing anything in SEO still have some two thirds or more of the traffic you started the year with.

SEO Proposal

Posted on September 25, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO Consultant 1 Comment

The majority of the SEO consultants have started doing SEO for their own site. After the initial SEO success they offer the SEO services to the ‘Friends and Family’ – the people they know. If that goes well after a few projects, the larger clients start lining up. The real legal entity gets established to invoice those larger customers – A SEO Consultancy. Good word travels fast – especially in the SEO world since the SEO people are extremely well connected since the social bookmarking and networking is the part of the SEO service itself.

If you are good professional SEO expert sooner rather then later an upfront description of the work you will perform for the client, will not be as it was in the start when it sounded like:

- I’ll get you on the first page of Google!

Than as you learned more about the SEO yourself (on the clients web sites!):

- I’ll get you on the first page in Google for many relevant phrases!

If you are a good SEO Guru, you will start taking larger and larger SEO projects. The bigger the budget the more paperwork is involved so SEO Proposal will have to evolve with the budget increases as well.

The general rule of thumb is the following:

1. No SEO Proposal should be shorter than one page. Write about yourself If you have nothing else to put in it.
2. In general, a two page SEO Proposal should be your starting size and from then on…
3. Your SEO Proposal should contain half of the page for each average monthly salary in your country.
4. Corporate clients expect a corporate communication and branding style so your SEO Proposal will start with a lot of your own branding, and end up with your accreditations and customer references.

Remember that sending the inappropriate type of a SEO Proposal to the wrong type of the recipient will most likely be a waste of your time. You simply need to understand what to send whom to. A start up where the managing director is also answering the phone, sill not have time to read your 25 page brochure-ware proposal. He has no time for that. He needs to know just- How much, and what do we get? Sending a short two pager to a global corporate will result in them asking for more and that only if they are really interested about you. They are used to their corporate way of communications, and will expect your SEO Proposal almost as the proper full blown tender.

Ireland Search Engine Marketing Report 2008

Posted on September 23, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Search Engine Marketing, SEM Leave a comment

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

How Does SEO Fall Into Your Company

Posted on September 23, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, SEO Consultant Leave a comment

With the SEO staff there is always a dilemma, if to put them in the IT or the Marketing department. Unfortunately that is the one that does not really have the right answer. SEO should not really be neither with the IT nor Marketing. SEO staff need to be in between those two, probably reporting to the same management level where you IT (or Development if you are in IT company) and Marketing are reporting.

Why is SEO ‘so important’?
Well the SEO staff have a job to make sure that the IT and Marketing excel in what they do without clashing into each other’s territory.

What makes a good SEO professional?

The term Team Player describes well what a SEO staff need to be good at. Unfortunately this is completely incompatible with one of the most important skills required for the perfect SEO person and it is entrepreneurship. SEO is changing and evolving rapidly. The SEO person needs to be a serious ‘forward thinker’. Again, being a visionary and the analytical is again extremely rare in the same person. Statistical Analysis is the base and the start of any SEO. There is a high level of leadership skills required to get the web developers and marketing staff involved constructively into the common project, and make them byte in to it. Vendor management skills, and negotiation skills in general is certainly required to manage the external SEO and PPC vendors, partners and consultants.

Let’s just list the skills described above in a simple list:

Team Player vs. Entrepreneur (Soloist, Leader)
Statistical Analysis (Detail Oriented) vs. Creative Forward Thinker
Negotiator vs. Charismatic
Management Experience
Results Driven (doesn’t it sound so much like ‘Black Hat’)
….

The more you define your SEO staff requirements the more complex it gets. It actually gets to the utopia stage, since there as a so many so conflicting skills required. Perhaps hiring the SEO staff in house doesn’t sound as that good idea anymore?

BLOG = Better Listings On Google

Posted on September 22, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Blog, Google, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Leave a comment

I don’t really know who said it first:

BLOG = Better Listings On Google

If you search Google index the quotes start appearing in early 2005. Back then, I did not really believe it.

Oh boy, how wrong was I…

Outsourcing your web site SEO Service?

Posted on September 22, 2008 by SEO Consultant (admin) in Search Engine Optimisation, SEO Leave a comment

While talking to the Search Engine Optimisiation (SEO) providers, here are the few tips that will help you find the SEO company that is right for you. And your web site.

RED FALGS while choosing the SEO SERVIES! The following is the list of things to avoid at all costs in order of importance.

1. Getting involved with a SEO company based on the nice email you just got in your mailbox, that has a report about your site linked and a nice thumbnail screenshot of your front page is going to get you as much good to your business as getting involved with any other SPAM email your get every day.
2. We can rank you on top for the single word phrase of your choice. – when a SEO service company offers you something that sounds just too good, it probably is – just too good to be true. Do not expect to get on top of the search for any commonly used English word. Web sites that get that high have a team of SEO gurus working in house and managing a number of external SEO service providers.
3. Guaranteeing anything in SEO is just childish. It is rally easy to invest in the marketing with a tangible and measurable results. Unfortunately you cannot ‘Purchase SEO by Units’. Traditional marketing formulas do not work here. It is not back page of the Sunday Times, or the supplement in the magazine printed in X colors, on X pages in X copies. When a SEO service provider gives you guarantees of their future achievement, that is a almost certain guarantee you will not renew their contract!
4. Your SEO company is not going to tell you what are they going to do? Run away! It would be nice to just outsource your SEO Service to a vendor and forget about it, wouldn’t it? There are several layers if issues there. First is that your newly acquired traffic might simply disappear when you stop paying. Second is that you might even be penalised by Google for the actions of your SEO Service provider, and your site banned from the Google index for a long time.

SEO Service is many different tasks, and not all web sites necessarily need all of them. Also different SEO companies offer a different SEO services that in some cases do not overlap even marginally. Every SEO company will try to sell you the service they have on offer. Find a SEO company that sells the SEO service you want and need.

Do not talk to the sales people. As with any vendor, you need to talk to the people who will do the work for you or their management. Not the sales people. The sales guy you might spend an hour talking to might have been selling cars yesterday, and learned what SEO stands for yesterday.

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