• SEO
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Search Engine Optimization
• SEO consultant
• etc.

Note: I’m not slamming anyone company in these examples, well maybe one, but this is not the point of the post. I want to give some tips on picking a SEO company so that you know the right questions to ask and know when someone is pulling the wool (a little) over your eyes.

Reality Time

A sad fact in this matter is that people searching for [SEO] are more likely to be other SEO companies, rather than potential clients looking for some SEO help. So the fact that they rank for SEO probably doesn’t even help their bottom line. Here is a little comparison between the number of searches for [SEO] and the number of searches for [cake recipe] using a popular enough keyword [house prices] as a scale. This graph relates to the worldwide view rather than just Ireland.

It just can’t be that there are similar enough numbers of people looking to bake cakes, as there are people looking for information on SEO. My tip would be if a company says they rank for a keyword, give it a check on google trends or on google keyword tool for adwords to find out exactly how popular it is.

Looking at the amount of enquiries I got last year, and the % of them which came from the keyword [SEO] I would have to say it was close to zero. I would hazard a guess that the a lot of my manual comment SPAM for SEO tools and link building etc, is from dubious firms putting these keywords into their browser and going through the first few pages of Google results to find some links. So the fact that a company ranks for [SEO] doesn’t really help them, rather it probably wastes a bit of their resources, unless they are using it for bragging rights.

Final Thoughtson hiring a SEO company

If you are going to hire a SEO company, ask more about what they do and how they do things. What is their approach to site structure ? And how to they go about procuring back links ? Don’t be fooled when a company says that they are are #1 or #2 for a particular {keyword}, and therefore they must be good and they will be able to get you to rank at a high position too. Rather, ask for real life cases they have worked on, and what the resulting traffic increase has been because of their SEO efforts. Request Google Analytics data (or some other statistical report) of before and after the SEO campaign, and if necessary verify with their client that the SEO company has actually done this.

An aside : And oh, here are our SERPs for SEO so we do rank somewhere, but just not that high, but then again we are not looking for new clients, so that’s okay.

The stipulation for this to work is that you need to have either a Premier or a Business account. There is a feature called MassPay on Paypal where if you wanted to send multiple payments, you can simply upload a CSV file with the email address, the cash  amount and the currency. The fees here are much less, and there is just a flat fee charge of 2%. Here is what you need to do :

1. open up notepad
2. enter in person@email.com <tab> cashvalue <tab> currency code (USD / EUR/ etc)
3. for multiple payments you can enter the same as 2 , on the next line
4. save as ASCII .TXT file.
5. login to paypal and find the mass pay link at the bottom of the page
6. click make Mass Payment on the left hand side of the info page
7. fill out the form, and identify people with email address when asked.
8. click review, do a review and see the fees.
9. Click send and save some fees !

Paypal Fee Savings

For example if you wanted to send someone exactly €1000, it would typically cost you 3.4% plus €0.35 for the transaction charge so you would need to send an extra €35.56 . With Mass pay this would be the flat 2% or €20. Also what is nice with this method, you don’t need to calculate what you should pay someone via paypal so they get €1000, rather you would have the CSV file person@email.com  1000 EUR

So not only does it save you a few quid, the payee doesn’t see the unusual €1035.36 transaction, and a fee charge,  rather just get an entry for the whole €1000.

It obviously works for smaller amounts, so it depends on whether you want to spend the extra few steps to save cash. I always think, better in your pocket than someone else’s !

Merry Christmas !

And once you focus your mouse on the input box to put in your search query, the other links are then shown. For this test it wasn’t every visit to google.de resulted in such a behaviour, it was more randomised.

Google UI Testing Video

Use full screen to see more details.

Google can generate valuable information from these testing sessions in the areas of usability / accessibility / user experience / conversion optimisation. What do you think of all these Google UI tests ?

1. The 3rd Bar Camp Cork is on next weekend, November 14th 2009. If you can make it I would really advise popping along and listening in on some of the talks (or even giving a talk yourself). Last year it was the first event of it’s kind I went to, and it was worth travelling back from Munich to attend.  I met some great people and actually learned alot from it. If you want to meet some  motivated online entrepreneurs and IT geniuses then this is the place to be. Sadly I can’t make it this year, but hopefully I will be there again next year.
   
2. The SEO world tends to get a bad reputation for dubious offerings, being over priced or just plain out lying. Often these companies contact clients of mine offering the sun, moon and stars. They tend to talk about  special affiliations to google, and promise that they can achieve organic SEO #1 positions for competitive keywords.  A while ago, fancy dress mogul Ronan O’Brien called foul over a SEO company Storm Media , and managed to grab their attention via his blog. Check out the blog post about Storm Media. This company has also been covered by other Irish bloggers like Sian Phillips

Hopefully the next update won’t be as long coming.:D

User-agent: Kids
Disallow: /tricks
Allow: /treats

And last year they also had a special edition :

User-agent: zombies
Disallow: /brains

Some issues with jobberbase

Although the software is strong, there are a few weaknesses, especially for the SEO side of things. The first problem is that the footer template (located at /_templates/default/footer.tpl) is a global footer. This means that the same footer is used right across the whole website. Generally your homepage is your strongest page on your website and you should use this. We recommend adding a custom footer for the homepage and adding some extra text or  perhaps deeper links to your site from here. Also if you are linking to other websites the effective difference between a site-wide link and a homepage link is minimal.
Another, and perhaps less known issue with jobberbase (in versions up to 1.8 at least) is the fact that the error page template returns a HTTP status of 200 (page found), rather than a 404 (page not found) error code. With jobberbase, once a job is removed, the page is no longer listed and if you call the URL of this job you will be redirected to a generic “unavailable page”, but this page is served as a real page (that should be indexed) rather than as an error page. My quick solutions to address these two issues are highlighted below (file references here are made for version 1.8 of jobberbase)

Jobberbase custom homepage footer

• copy the file /_templates/default/footer.tpl to /_templates/default/footer-home.tpl
• edit the file /_templates/default/footer-home.tpl to add in more navigational links or text.
• edit the file /_templates/default/index.tpl and change the last line from

{include file="footer.tpl"}
to
{include file="footer-home.tpl"}

Jobberbase proper error page handling

• copy the file /_templates/default/header.tpl to /_templates/default/header-404.tpl
• edit the file /_templates/default/header-404.tpl and add at the top of the file

{php}
header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found");
{/php}

• edit the file /_templates/default/error.tpl change the first line from

{include file="header.tpl"}

to
{include file="header-404.tpl"}

Advertise your open jobs

And finally if you are an Irish company, and want to find good quality staff for free, then we recommend you submit your jobs to jobs in ireland where you have total control of the applications and best of all it’s completely free ! www.jobsinireland.org

Some quick points noted about Google Caffeine :

• Image results seem to have lower priority.
• Search results appears to be about 50% faster.
• Larger index size.
• A different sensitivity to keywords in domain names.

Caffeine Comparison Tool

As always we like comparisons to be easy, like the Google / Bing Comparison, so I chopped the tool around to do a comparison between Google and the new Google Caffeine version and it’s located at www.comparecaffeine.com .Give the tool a run and see for yourself the differences.

Right now we have a US .com and Irish .IE targeted versions, more can be added upon request. Just say the word !

Updates

Given the amount of feedback I’ve gotten, I decided to implement some changes:

• Added .CO.UK version , the tool is now available in .COM / .CO.UK / .DE & .IE versions
• Ability to see more than 10 results, now has the option to show 10/20/50/100 SERPs
• Personalised search is turned off. Result changes on the current version of Google SERPs won’t be effected by what you have clicked / searched previously.

Bing From Microsoft

Today Microsoft has relaunched Windows Live search and it is now called Bing (www.bing.com). Right now Bing looks very promising, at least for the US market, their image search and some localisation seems to be better compared with google.com. For some searches like [thai restaurant 33308] the results are very similar indeed. Bing’s image search has a nice slight zoom in featyre , and “similar images to this” option which is rather nice. They present the results rather clearer than google, and have an easier navigation system on the left hand side to drill down on queries.

For Bing.IE the results we looked at seem on a par with google.ie, i.e. as good or even better, when it comes to general queries of facts ([horse racing] for example). But when we start to ask more localised and to ask for [doctors in Cork] or [cooking courses], bing starts to show it’s weakness. I would generally expect more local search results to be returned, even without specifying “only pages from Ireland”. I’m sure that this will be improved over time, and Bing.IE’s deficiencies are not always a bad thing. Right now there are very little ads on bing.ie, so you can be sure that the results you are getting are not confusing you with paid ads. This alone would move me to check bing before google.

Compare Google & Bings Search Results

For SEOs we have thrown together a quick tool that basically compares the two search engines side by side in one frame. Check out our Google compared with Bing Tool . Here you have the option to compare the .com or the .ie version of the search engines . The query will check and display the results for both search engines so you can see the difference in their ordering of the SERPs.

Google vs. Bing

Search Results compared

Submit your site to Bing

Hat tip to Michele for the link toBing’s URL submission. If you were previously in MSN Live Search results, then your site should also be listed in Bing, but if not you should take the time to add your URL.

Is Bing the Google Killer ?

Right now I think it is too early to say whether Bing is a real Google killer, but it does look like it will give Google a run for their money. I’ve read that Microsoft are planning an ad campaign in around the $100m mark, so after that I’m sure everyone will know what it is ‘to bing‘ just like they know what it is ‘to google‘.

Business Listing

So if you were a Doctor in Cork, you could possibly easily get your business listed in the A-J business listing. Just think of the extra number of enquiries/leads that a bussiness could get by having their business appear in such listings. Of course some areas of business areas are already using this to full effect, take the hotels in dublin for example.

Hotels in Dublin

List your business on Google Local Business Listing

Here is a quick run down on how to  get your business listed on the google local business listings:

1. Go to the Local Business Center
2. Login with your google account
3. Select Add New Listing
4. Enter your business details and link to your website
5. Select your business categories  and add opening hours
6. Verify by phone/SMS/post

When adding your business we would recommend to add as much information as you can. Also think about optimising your company’s name listing to insure that it includes the type of business you operate.

For the US listings, Google has used some 3rd party websites like the Yellow Pages & Trip Advisor to seed the index. And it appears that some of the Irish listings have come through 3rd party sites also. If your company is listed via one of these sites, you can still take ownership by clicking on the link and viewing the full listing and then select “Add or edit your business”.

The Bad of Google Business Listing

Where there is any oppertunity to game google there will be people who will take advantage of it. Right now there does appear to be some SPAM in the listing for some queries like [car hire cork]

Spam in the Business Listings

Right now there doesn’t seem to be a way to report a listing, but maybe Google will add that soon.

Edit : Thanks to JohnMuller from Google I found out how to report SPAM on google maps.

The site in question is HarleyMedical.ie has a really nice design and decent navigation, site structure.

above the fold view

But let’s have a look at the full page view:

full page view (click to view)

There seems to be some large port of text at the bottom of the main page. The big worry is that they have have over 280 links on their home page. And on the sub-pages it averages closer to 160 links per page.

These links are clearly targeting keywords and it doesn’t appear that they are using them as a navigational aid. We all know links are important. Of course you should link to your some of your more important internal content from the home page, but basically having a keyword stuff sitemap at the bottom of the page really won’t help you rankings. In fact it could possibly have negative effects.

Here is a zoom in on those famous links:
 

200+ links in the footer

Currently it doesn’t seem like they have a penalty from google, they are ranking well for [cosmetic surgery] on google.ie and some other terms. Also they have around 150 pages in the index. We would see this SEO tactic as “high risk SEO” which would have the potential to have a domain banned from google.

A further SEO look

As for off page SEO , HarleyMedical doesn’t have many links, but they have gone the route of submitting some “basic press releases“. These types of links can be helpful for new websites, but what you really need is some good, relevant, trustable links.

There is also a potential issue with having similar content on their .co.uk domain, and it does appear that at least one other domain has taken a copy of their content as well.

And one final tip, fix the canonical URL issue

 Here is a quick quide on how to list your blogroll links on your homepage. It involves editing one of your templates (Admin Menu > Appearance > Editor) and editing some wordpress code around where the Blogroll links are called. On the default Wordpress Theme (and probably your theme also) it can be found in the sidebar.php file. 

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); ?>

Before you start to try and edit the template you need to make sure that you have uploaded the file so it can be edited. 

Replace the code above with the following code:
<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks('title_after=&title_before='); } ?>

The is_home() function is an inbuilt wordpress function that checks if the page you are on is the home page, and if so it will display the subsequent code. 

Note if you are using “widgets” (Admin Menu > Appearance > Widgets) to populate  your sidebar, then this method might not work.

Some more advanced examples of listing blogroll links

<?php if (is_home()) { wp_list_bookmarks(); } else { wp_list_bookmarks('category=4'); } ?>

This example will show all bookmarks on the home page, and on all other pages it will show just links that are in the 4th category. You can find out the link category number by going to (Admin Menu > Links > Link Categories), then click on the category you want to be displayed. You will now see a URL in your browser that ends in &cat_ID=XX, where XX is the category number. In our example we will display category 4 on all other pages.

I hope Hans enjoys his prize !

Auction ends in 1 week, April 30th.

So fi you want to win some great memoribilia then please chewck out the ebay auction.

Paul

One of the easiest ways to see if you are penalised by Google is to see how your traffic is doing. Here in this example that show things quite nicely. Here we are looking between February and April 2009.

example of a Google penalty

The client in question received a number of new links via some media attention, which was in turn picked up by some blogs. Initially the traffic grew to about 300% it’s base level, and then suddenly dropped off to about 5% of the traffic in the previous month. The remaining traffic was coming from other search engines, 3rd party site who linked to the client and direct type in traffic.   Looking at the previous traffic , from the start of the year:

Jan 1st to Mar 10

We see that the traffic to the site was increasing steadily, it had some peaks and dips, in this case due to weekend traffic fluctuations, and then around February 26th there were two big jumps over 2 days. And then suddenly zero. So what happened ? Our guess is that because of the quick increase of the number of links to the site, that Google decided to over night cut off the traffic to it. This was also confirmed by seeing that the clients SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) were also removed. The site: operator on Google was saying that the domain not in the index. For all of the other queries, where traffic was previously coming from, the client was no longer listed.

Our actions against the penalty

The client contacted us and gave us access to their Google analytics account, where we discovered that there was some strange things going on. When realising that they were no longer showing up within the first 5 pages for queries they normally ranked for and having no results from the site operator. We requested a reconsideration request on Google webmaster tools (click talk to Google on the right hand side, and then request reconsideration. Here we outlined what we thought had happened, and within about 2 weeks the traffic started to come back. We also took it as an opportunity to get some authoritative links from some business partners of the client, in order to add more trust to the domain. To enable faster spidering we also added a XML sitemap. This also helped to see if there were any problems indexing the content again. Note: When you send a reconsideration request you won’t hear back from Google, the only way you can find out if it was granted is if you start to see your site appearing in the index again.

Google on Reconsidering Request

Here is a quick video tutorial from Google on the topic of “Requesting reconsideration”

Further reading

Here are two good posts about the google penalties from SEOmoz.ORG and SearchEngineLand.com and are well worth a read.

For my clients I tend to check on a monthly basis, who we link to, and what links those websites in turn link to. It’s not enough to make sure that the websites are live, rather one would need to check visually what is being display on these websites and where the links go to.   Also it is important to monitor if sites are being dropped (i.e. failed to be renewed, and subsequently registered by someone else) or if they have recently changed hands. Being anyway associated with dubious domains has the potential to damage your SERPs (the so called “bad neighbourhood” effect). Often when these sites are bought or picked from the dropped list, the old version of the website will remain (or re-appear, scraped from somewhere like google cache or archive.org) and then over a period of time these dubious links will creep in. This all sounds like a bit of work, but in the end it can avoid damage to your online reputuation. It’s not enough just to have a google alert, which emails you whenever someone mentions your website/brand, online reputation management should start at home, on your website. Have a look at your older out going links to make sure that they still work and they still link to the website you intended to.

Just today there was a high profile case of the British Home Office linking to a Japanese porn site  on BBC News.

If you have an online shop, or sell items online and you want to increase your sales rates, then this will probably be right up your street. Right now Richard is only offering this to 5 Irish companies, so be quick.

Here is an example of the older view, for the keyword “Recruit Ireland”

But now on certain phrases (perhaps more general queries) these site links are compressed on one line.

Site Links Jobs

In this climate the keyword “jobs” is highly sought after, but it’s also possible that it is just too general of a keyword to merit expanded sitelinks. 

upon searching for “jobs.ie” you will get the full expanded version of their sitelinks.

Site Link Cars

And here is a further example for a highlight competitive keywords “cars”, on google.ie.

It will be interesting to see how traffic is effected by this recent change by google. It could mean that there will be a higher CTR through to your homepage, as sitelinks are not always shown up so prevalent. For those of you in positions other than first, I would expect that by making sure your keyword description that little bit more appealing you will be able to benefit from this change.

Sitelink Tip

Did you know that you can control your website’s sitelinks on the google webmaster console ? Here you can remove links that you don’t want to appear in your sitelinks.

So generally when I look at the website the first thing I do is I check out the source to see what engine it runs on. And I am happy to see that Dine To Read has the latest version of wordpress (2.7.1). Looking further into the website there is an easy to use navigation bar at the top, and links throughout the website have a nice structure (using the permalinks feature on wordpress), and they offer all the relevant information, such as a privacy policy, contact form, etc. One change I would make to the contact form is to also have a physical address available on that page also.  It’s also good to see that they are hosted in Ireland (with Blacknight).

There error page returs the right HTTP status code (namely a 404). But I would offer more infomation than:

The page you have requested does not exist. You might be able to find what you’re looking for from our home page.

Rather I would suggest they include a search bar (wordpress has an easy search function) and include links to some of their more popular parts of the website.

Getting back to the topic of search, this is something that is missing on their pages. Having a method where people can search through your site (especially if it is a dynamic site that changes often) is very important. This can be both good for existing users who remember a certain helpful page, say on the forum, but can’t find it anymore, as well as for new visitors so they can find what they want fast. 

The titles of the pages should be improved. Title text helps users aswell as search engines. By tweaking your title text to make it more attractive.  The main page for example “Dine to Read – A book club with a difference” really doesn’t use the title tag to it’s full effect. One thing with wordpress is that it lists the name of the website before the title of the page. This means that every single title will have Dine to Read at the start. Generally you will try  to have the keywords you want indexed at the start of title. An example of what would be better wouuld be ::

• Irish book club with a difference – Dine to Read
• Book club that discusses books over dinner – Dine to Read – A book club with a difference
• etc

There is a great plugin call All in One SEO pack  which will help you change titles of the pages, and it will also allow you to specify META keywords and META description tags on a per post/page basis. The META description is something that is used when displaying your search result, and when optimised (along with title tags) it can greatly increase you click through ratio in the SERPs. This would help pages in the News section to rank higher.

This will also help avoid content showing up multiple times. Wordpress is particularly bad at having more than one place where you can see the content of blog post.  For example you can see the post about World Book Day : here, here, here and here, and if you had categories you would be able to see it in more places ! These should have the noindex attribute to them, and this plugin will make sure of that for you. This would be another reason why the news section pages are not really being indexed by google right now.

So wrapping up my 45 minute analysis , I would say that over all dinetoread.ie , is a solild site, but it there are still a few tweaks that can make it more sound. 

Other things that are missing that could be added easily:

• a robots.txt file, currently this displays the main page and could cause problems. It doesn’t even give a 404 code, it says what is displayed on your robots.txt is an actual page. 
• a sitemap.xml file to tell the search engines what pages on your website are more important than others, and should effect the order of such queries. Currently the forums are figuring higher than the main page for example. 

*note : as this is a new site, there are not many inlinks, and therefore not easy to analyse this part of the website.

MadeInHollywood has worked with some interesting clients like Arnotts and An Bord Gáis