SEO Consultant Ireland

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.

I don’t really know who said it first:

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…

The web site SEO Consultant is 4 months old today. Just a short recap of the achievements:

1. Google PR 5
2. Listed 4th for the keyword SEO (http://www.google.ie/search?q=seo)

Err,… nothing else really!

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.

The definition of the Good Google Web Traffic:

A good web traffic from Google search engine is the traffic of the visitors from from Google and found what they have been looking for on the web site. What this means is that the text in the search engine results page (SERP) that has represented the site (title, two lines of text and the web address) was descriptive and it represented well the page where the visitor was brought. A visitor who found what he was looking for will not click ‘Back’ in the browser to see the search results again and choose a different listing, but will stay on your page. If the web page is related to the topic a visitor is interested in, and the content is well distributed under easy to find headings, the visitor will most likely open a few more pages on your site.

How to recognise a Good Google Web Traffic in your web log files?

A good web traffic is the visitor who comes to your page and does not leave your site from that same page, especially without visiting any other page. Check web site visitors paths through the web site, and where you see a path that contains more than one page on your site – it is an interested visitor. If the referring page to the page the visitor came to (landing page) your site is Google, it is the Good Visitor from Google.

How to recognise a Bad Google Web Traffic in your web log files?

If the visitor paths contain the entries where the landing page is the exit page it is a clear indication that the web site visitor did not find what he was looking for you the site and have left without browsing around at all. If you notice that there are number of visitors from Google (or any other search engine) who just come to your site – and leave straight away, it is a clear indication that the listing of your site the way Google represented it is not what the visitor found on the landing page. Check the way Google represented your page in the search engine results page, and compare that text with what your web page contains. If the visitor cannot quickly find those same words or phrases from the SERP on top of the landing page – in most cases you have just generated a Bad Google Web Traffic.

A few times the new page I would be optimising for Google, I would se the new page all of the sudden, completely unexpected, on the first page in Google during the weekend. I would be happy and start the celebrations only to find out that on Monday the web site is nowhere in the SERP as it was last week.

When you are fine tuning the SEO of the web site you end up checking the ranking for the site every day. You check the ranking; you check what version of the page is in the Google cashe. You check when the latest Google XML Sitemap was submitted. You check it all against to your own log of changes of each page. And a zillion other little details in Google WebMaster Tools Console, an a whole list of third party software or services a search engine optimization professional uses.

When you check the rankings ever day you also get the feeling what will Google do and when. The more experience the more precise your predictions get. Until Google does the updates of the way it works, and it sets the quality of your prediction back somewhat.

One thing that I keep on noticing in the last two if not more years is the difference in the Google results that happen during the weekend. How does it manifest? Usually a new site pops out (out of nowhere really) somewhere in the middle of the first page of of the Google search results page. It stays there over the weekend, and on Monday morning, it is nowhere to be seen again. Sometimes it happens for a number of weekends in the row. Usually not more than 4 consecutive weekends. And what happens then? One of the Mondays Google simply does not remove the page from the first page listing. The new page that firstly appeared only during weekends, simply gets its ranking, and usually stays there where it was during the previous weekends fro months before moving up or down in the search engine results page.

You can actually use this strange feature of Google displaying different search results during weekend to check what sites are likely to get to the first page son, of who is catching up with your search engine optimization efforts.

A new domain registered and submitted to Google will show in the search engine results pages (SERP) in 22 hours.

This is the answer to the SEO Speed Test: SEOConsultant.ie in Google.ie?

The first milestone was to got the SEO Consultant web stite (SEOConsultant.ie) listed in the Google’s search engine results pages. It took 22 hours.

The next milestone is to get the SEO Consultant web site listed on the First page results in Google.

After the first indexing the domain SEO Consultant domain is ranked number one and two for the domain name ‘’seoconsultant’.
http://www.google.ie/search?&q=seoconsultant

It is also ranked in the first page on the 7th place for the keyphrase ‘seo consultant’
http://www.google.ie/search?&q=seo+consultant

For the same phrase ‘seo consultant’ when a option ‘pages from Ireland’ is selected the SEO Consultant web page is ranked number one:
http://www.google.ie/search?&q=seo+consultant&meta=cr%3DcountryIE

The conclusion of this fist part of the test it that it takes Google about 22 hours to include the domain in its index from the submission time. The next goal of the SEO Speed Test: SEOConsultant.ie in Google.ie? is to see the length of time required to list the domain on the first page for the part of the domain name – the word, or the abbreviation to be more precise – ‘SEO’.

Anyone who ever had a web site wanted his web site to appear on the first page in Google for the important keywords. People just assume that since they invested into the development of their web site, that they ‘deserve’ to be listed, and listed high in the search engine results pages (SERP) What people do not consider is the size of the competition. Google itself for many, many years shows exactly that – The size of the competition, besides every search result it produces. Check the image below showing the number of pages that Google has indexed that contain the word ‘SEO’.

Results 1 – 10 of about 165,000,000 for seo.

What Google is telling us is that there is about 165 millions of pages of the web pages that contain the word SEO that Google has found and included in the search engine results. By default Google shows 10 pages per page, so the first page only shows the top 10 of the 165 millions of pages. Jet every site owner wants to get listed there. Unfortunately there is space for the top ten web sites only.

To display more relevant and local search results Google does not display the same results to everyone. Based on your location (your IP actually) Google will display the results that are ‘more relative’ to your location that the overall top 10 highest ranked pages.

Google even allows limiting the search results to just the pages it has indexed from your country. For our sample search for the word ‘SEO’ if the option ’pages from Ireland’ is checked, note that the result actually contains a much smaller sumo of pages, just 274 000 pages as opposed of the 165 000 000 pages on the whole web that Google has in it’s index.

Note that the search results page with the ’pages in Ireland’ option selected contains far more local web sites, the majority of them the Irish domains ending with the ‘ie’ or ‘,com’s’ hosted on the servers in Ireland.

Knowing that there is about 274 000 pages in Ireland and 165 000 000 pages on the web that all compete for the same keyword ‘SEO’, how likely is that this new web site SEO Consultant will ever get listed on the first page as specified in the SEO Speed Test?

“A picture says more than a thousand words.” – approach is used in the search engine optimization reporting a lot. All the SEO reporting tools and software draw nice visual graphics reports. Little green arrows for the keywords performing better in the last period, and the red arrows for the badly performing keywords. The graphs for the numbers of hits, number of unique visitors, the length the average visitor have spent on he site, pages he visited…

Pictures in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Reports are there just to make the reports easier to read and understand. But the true question every buyer of the SEO services is really:

When are we going to get first in Google?

That is all really the average buyer is interested. All the rest is noise really.

So where is SEOConsultant.ie placed today in the index of the Google.ie?
http://www.google.ie/search?q=seoconsultant.ie

NOWHERE!

The domain is registered just before lunch today, so the obvious it true. The SEO Consultant web site did not make it to the search engine results page (SERP) jet.