SEO Consultant Ireland

To make sure the search results are relevant and SPAM clean Google doesn’t rank well two web sites that contain the same content. This is to prevent the search results for a term being a copy of one another. Google wants to present a variety of the most relevant results – not copies of even the most relevant.

To achieve this Google, and any other search engine for that matter has to make sure it does not contain more than one copy of the same site in its index. Bear in mind that the different images and different colours and font styles mean nothing to Google since Google is a text search engine. The fact that the web site can look completely different to the visitor means nothing to the search engine as long as the text on the pages is the same.

http://www.copyscape.com is a search engine that is looking for the sites that are similar to yours. It is actually connection to the Google API to find duplicates. If you feel you have a problem ranking your site it is worth checking if there is another copy on the web.

Why is my web site copied?

Web traffic has a value. Web traffic can be monetised. Google AdSense is one of the simplest ways to do it. IF you have a web site with visitors, Google will gladly become your partner and serve the ads from their Google AdWords customers on your pages.

The content of the page is the key of acquiring the web site traffic from the natural results in the search engines. This is why people copy your content to publish it to their own web site. Is it legal? Absolutely not. Does it hurt your web site ranking – in most cases yes. Should yo be doing something about it – yes if you intend to rank your website content high in the search engine results pages.

SEO Consultant (we) also provide the service of managing the duplicate content issues for the clients. Contact us and we can help you if your content gets copied.

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.

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.

The rule in online publishing is to put your main thought at the very beginning of the article. The title is what gets read first. It acts as a filter. Poor title – lost visitor. The subtitle is the second filter with the equal importance. The first sentence has almost the same power.

Therefore to write successfully for the web you need to make every word and sentence very interesting. Topic specific, catchy and simply short. The Invert Pyramid is the widely used term to describe the style and the method for writing for the web. First you say waht you have to say, and then elaborate. It is the opposite to how majority of the people write today.

After about 10 year writing for the web, I still cannot write naturally in the up side down pyramid way. My most popular published articles actually are 100% ‘rewritten’. I write a blog post ‘normally’. If it contains 10 sentences, I give each sentence a score from one to ten. Then I put sentence in the order of importance (most important first). Then I change the words in the sentences to make the article readable. Some sentences get dropped out in this process. I end up with about 60% of the original text in the process. It is also important to read the article few more times to get inspiration where to link the bottom of the article to (further info, related articles, etc).

“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.