SEO Consultant Ireland

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.

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.

Google introduced Custom Reporting (beta) to the Google Analytics.
Here is what Google says about the new Custom Reporting:

Design a custom report to display the dimensions and metrics you want to analyze. For example, you can build custom reports to help answer questions like:
• How are my keywords performing in different countries?
• Should I target my site to Spanish users?

There is also a short video from Google:

Google Analytics Custom Reporting

If you are serious about understanding your traffic the Custom Reporting is exactly what you need. Then again if you do not truly understand your current traffic, you are not really in the best position to start increasing your web site traffic.

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.

SEO Keywords in Ireland – By Google Keyword Tool (July, 2008)

Well perhaps not really ‘The Ultimate’ but certainly the interesting one. It is far more geared towards helping you to manage your Google AdWords campaign (or basically steal your competitors one!), but has an interesting SEO Ranking report as well.

Their SEO ranking tool is missing the Internationalisation that they support quite well in the Payd Keywords analysis, and that is the major drawback on the usage for of the KeywordSpy for the International search engine optimisation.

This is what the KeywordSpy marketing blob says about themselves:

Find which keywords your competitors are using!
Increase your Ad Campaign revenue by finding the most profitable keywords.
Get access to over a billion keywords in our database.

KeywordSpy is certainly the one to keep an eye at, since they are adding new and interesting features fast as well.

After some 2 and a half months, the SeoSonsultant.ie is on the first page in Google for the search keyword ‘SEO’, with the option ‘Pages in Ireland’ selected.

The blog activity statistics in those two months is:

Blog Stats
There are currently 20 posts and 27 comments, contained within 6 categories and 50 tags.

So not really impressive, 20 posts in 2 months? And already on the first page in Google.ie for the keyword SEO?

The next and the last milestone is to get listed on the first page in Google.ie without the ‘Pages in Ireland’ option selected! Any bets?

The Content is The King! –

Everyone working in the search engine optimisation industry (SEO) is asking themselves the same question: Is onsite optimisation more important than the offsite optimisation today? Are those inbound links from other sites really crucial in determining the sites ranking? Should one invest his time to do the optimisation of the page itself at all if the ranking is determined by the number and the quality of the inbound links?

Here is a test to answer to the question:

1. Register a new domain name.
2. Install some blogging software on it.
3. Set up your blogging software so that is sends a PING to the search engines when a new post is published.
4. Setup and configure the XML Sitemap generation and automatic submission after a new post is published on a blog.
5. Setup the SEO optimisation of your blog posts page – Title, Meta, URL rewriting, H1, H2,…
6. Write your first article with a Title of your blog post as the phrase you want to rank high in Google. For the purpose of this test take an easy 4 or 5 word phrase.
7. Wait from a few minutes to a few days, make a search for the phrase that is a tile of your blog post.
8. If everything is done right – you should have your blog post listed on the No 1. In Google within a week of registering a domain.

Note: there isn’t a single inbound link to that domain at all, and jet it ranks on top of the search for the specific phrase.

Conclusion:

Inbound links are important for your web site search ranking. But inbound links, regardless of their quantity or their quality (importance of the sites linking to you, and text they link to you with) cannot replace the content on your site. The test above proves the opposite scenario – where there are absolutely none inbound links, and the content on a well optimised web page itself made the page to rank on top in the search engine for the relevant keyword.

The Content is The King!

The Canonical URL issue that is talked about a lot lately since even Google itself it has a huge impact on the search engine ranking of your web page is all about defining one page and one URL of your web site to help the search engines define what the real Home of your web site is, and pass on all the links to any other pages to this one Home page.

Matt wrote about it even back in 2006 here: SEO advice: url canonicalization

Some people got it, some did not. Some people take advantage of it and some do not. IT’s a bit like saying:

Some companies care about their ranking in Google and some not.

There is one domain (company) that actually took the canonical URL issue to the whole new level. What they have done is they have created two completely different web sites that show in the two versions of their URL. When the domain is accessed with a domain name that contains the ‘www’ part in it –one site shows up, and the same domain name without the ‘www’ part of the address shows a completely different web site.

At first it looked like a mistake made on the web server configuration, but contacting the company in question revealed that that was actually done intentionally.

An interesting and original approach to URL canonicalization. I do not remember anyone ever trying anything similar jet. Could they be on to something? It is clear that both versions of the web site will dilute the value the Google assigns. The Google Page Rank (PR) will be lower on both sites than it would be if one site would have been redirected to the other. The search engine ranking of both versions will again be lower than if the redirection was in place. Also by having the completely different content and the code on the two versions of the site, Google will have to index and therefore rank them completely independently.

There are no obvious benefits of doing splitting your web site into the two different versions. On the other implementing the two versions of the web site will definitely hurt your Google rankings.

The user / visitor of the site will also get extremely surprised with the two so different versions on the web site. Different company name, address, email, phone, fax number and everything really. It does really look like another company. It is only the call to their IT department that assured of their intentional ‘splitting’ of the domain name, and creation of the canonical URL.

The local Google ie version might be fast, and show relevant results, but it is seriously messed up sometimes. There are three places on this page where Google ie shows the number of the results. The first two times it is in the blue bar on top of the page where it reads:

Results 1 – 10 of about 6 from www.seoconsultant.ie. (0.34 seconds)

Well 1 – 10 means there is ten results or more. Than it says ‘about 6’ –and there is 10 on this page alone. On the bottom of the page it offers links to the page 1, 2 and 3 of the results. The default value of the number of the results per page is 10, so it would indicate 21 results at least.

So all together in this guesstimateology Google ie shows that there is 1 to 10, 6 and +21 results. And in reality, it shows 15.

Such is our local Google ie!