Archive for the ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ Category

Make your Web Page Meta Descriptions Work for You

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Meta description values are used by the search engines as the snippets that show up under the web page address or URL in the search engine results. For example when doing a quick Google search for the term “scaffolding Ireland” these were the results.

“In addition to Sale & Hire, our Contracts Department works with many of Ireland’s major building contractors to supply and erect scaffolding…”

“Scaffolding Formwork in Ireland, find whatever you need wherever you need it…”

“keycons003 / keycons003×34 20/08/2009 02:17:38 / A3 / B4 / 0.3603516, 66.249.65.21514. Scaffolding Erectors And Hirers, Ireland…”

Would you agree that these leave a lot to be desired?
Read the rest of this entry »

Google Analytics Disadvantages – It Can’t Track Website Crawlers

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Ok first up I have to say that we are all fans of Google Analytics here, with good reason: it’s zero-cost, its rich array of features: brilliant reporting capabilities, the ability to slice and dice the data in almost every conceivable way, the slick ajax-ified interface, and the support for advanced stuff like advanced segmentation and something that I really love using on e-commerce sites – goals and funnels, and for the nerds among us – filters.

  1. The analytics data is not available in real-time, you have to wait until midnight passes the next day to see yesterday’s data
  2. The data is not yours – it’s Google’s – and for all of the clean image that Google has (”don’t be evil”), forgive me when I say that I prefer to have my own copy of my website trend and visitor data.
  3. Google Analytics works by including a JavaScript snippet in your pages, but search engine spiders (”crawlers”) don’t execute JavaScript when they load your site’s pages, so their visits aren’t logged by Google Analytics. So when spiders from GoogleBot, Inktomi (Yahoo), Bing (Microsoft’s new search engine), Ask and Baidu crawl your site, you know absolutely zero about it from looking at your GA reports.

Read the rest of this entry »

Google Local Search – How to Easily Get Your Business Listed #1 on Google

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Google Local Search has recently kicked in with a vengeance in Ireland, with map results with local business listings being displayed #1 on the search results page when someone types in a search with a town or city name in the search term, when business listings which are taken from the Google Local Business Center match the searched for keyphrase and town or city name.

For example, a search on Google.ie as follows “online marketing cavan” yields the following results:
Read the rest of this entry »

Using Google’s Wonder Wheel for AdWords Keyword Research

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

Google have added a new tool to their already impressive array of search engine features and tools which can give you a great insight into how keywords relate in respect of real searches conducted on Google. One of the uses that this tool has is that it can really help you to structure your AdWords campaigns for maximum clout, helping your Quality Score and therefore your cost effectiveness and hence your profitability.

The name of the tool is Wonder Wheel and is available under the “Show Options” link to the top left of the main search results pane. Check out the screenshot below to see how to access it. Read the rest of this entry »

Cashing in on Search Traffic – Simple SEO Produces Results

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009

Ok now I make no secret that I like to build sites on WordPress whenever it is a suitable,  as it allows us to do fundamental on-page SEO on a site pretty easily, and also the blogging system is easy to configure and tweak on WordPress.  We have a client who is targeting the Life Coaching niche (Dating and Relationship coaching in particular), and we recently build a site for her, you can check it out at www.GoodLifeCoaching.ie. Its build on WordPress 2.7 and is also a bilingual site, as it allows the owner to write post and page content in both English and German, and allows the visitors to switch between languages by clicking on the appropriate link.  Read the rest of this entry »

So, You Want to SEO? Here’s a quick DIY On-Page SEO Glossary

Monday, April 13th, 2009

When you are working on doing your own on-page Search Engine Optimisation at first the task can seem daunting, but there is good news: fortunately there are only a few areas that you need to concern yourself with, so here is a guide to help you make sure that you are not missing anything.
Read the rest of this entry »

First Things First – Examine the Analytics Data & Establish the Facts

Thursday, March 19th, 2009

A good friend of mine has a small family business which they are looking to expand despite these troubling times, and have a very nice e-commerce website which they launched in 2008 to that end. They are located in Co. Cavan just on the Fermanagh border, and have a .co.uk domain parked on their .com so as to service the UK as well as Ireland and beyond. They got a very good site build for them by a local website company here in Cavan, my friends over at Web Edge (Irish Web Developers – http://www.irishwebdevelopers.com). The site was built on Zen Cart and got a major upgrade recently which saw some significant SEO improvement features being introduced with the new version of Zen Cart in the upgrade.

So anyway, my friend mentioned to me that he wanted to get an AdWords campaign going in order to get some traffic to the site and generate more sales as business from the website have been slow. I remarked “ah, ok, well how many visitors are you getting to the site per day at the moment?” to which he looked at me perplexed and replied “don’t know!”. So we hopped up to the computer and logged into his Google Analytics account.

We were presented with the Google Analytics dashboard: Read the rest of this entry »