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What the Hell is a Google Expert?

Jul 30

Posted by Kieran Daly in Google Tips, SEO | No Comments

Google Experts Magnifying Glass

Google Expert's Magnifying Glass

There are a lot of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)  experts in Ireland.  I am not one of them.  They all have a wealth of knowledge and expertise on how Google behaves when it crawls and indexes.

Its how they make their money and help you to get traffic to your site.  Most clients ring me at my website design company and ask if they can be number one on Google.  But I leave this to the so called experts.  I can help them with on page and some simple strategies for off page that most website designers should provide as part of their service.

I wish the SEO people every one of the well.  Are they Google Experts?  Well the short answer is No.  If you want a Google expert then call up Google for advice.  Oh I forgot they wont help you.  However Google do provide a lot of expert advice in their own pages like Google Webmaster and Google Code.  It is all free and there are a lot of YouTube channels devoted to sensible advice from them on how to design your site to help it rank when it is crawled. Combine this with a well thought out keyword analysis and you are setting down solid foundations for getting some rank placement.

To say you are a Google expert is completely wrong.  To say you you have an understanding of how Google behaves when it crawls is closer to the truth.  SEO experts have learned to understand this by working with customers on a combination of well written and structured page content, good back link strategies and a lot of off page effort to move your page up to the coveted first page.  There are also items like the following

  • Well written up to date content
  • Regularly updated site
  • Domain name, age and location
  • Number of back links to your site from high traffic sites.

Google Local Keywords can help you sometimes but not in a more competitive landscape to get some google juice but the secret to becoming a Google expert is very simple don’t bother.  Do bother however reading, understanding and researching the fascinating area  of Search Engine Optimisation.

The author is neither a Google Expert nor an SEO expert but he is an expert at drinking Heineken and is available for that!

Incestuous SEO Keywords for Technology Sites

Jul 29

Posted by Kieran Daly in SEO | No Comments

No this isn’t a post about incest the incest is that people building their on page may be a large part of the search volume for specific keywords hence the incest!

If you look at your keywords in the  Google Keywords Tool. and think about what your competitors are doing then it shows that you should reduce the actual search volume by a certain factor.

Disclaimer this is not forensic just a random thought process about keywords.

Here a  Keyword Example

Lets say your keywords are Hotels County Cork. It’s a pretty competitive keyword with 1300 searches in Ireland for July when I checked today.

Now lets analyse this number.  If there is some SEO person doing some work out there for some of the hotels then the odds are that they Google this keyword combination at least once a day. So lets say there are 5 SEO people doing that – so scratch 5×30 days per month of those hits to give you 150.

Any self respecting hotel manager is looking at the competition out there.  And again lets say there are 10 hotel managers doing a similar search once a day this gives you 10×30 to again give you 300 hits.

I would estimate very conservatively a certain percentage of the people who tapped in this search term weren’t even interested in booking a room in a cheap hotel in Cork.  Lets say 100 of them (complete estimate there by the way may be on the low side?).  They hit the back button pronto

So total above gives you 1300 – 550 = 750 reducing the actual real traffic (and again the number of random surfers may be higher).

So what is critical for you for on page development is the following points.

  • Make sure that your site does not depend on a limited set of keywords and use long tail keywords where possible even if the numbers are lower.
  • Your Call To Action on the landing page needs to be strong and make the page sticky (e.g. make them stay browse and read).  A price offer, a contact link or form, an interesting article to read and so on.
  • On page SEO is not as important as having a very active off page strategy.  Some people even say that if you have good off page then your on page doenst matter (however call to action is still important). If you are in a competitive niche then it may make sense to pay someone to do your SEO.  Google SEO Ireland for the experts in this area.
  • Spend time working on good content it is the bye word of a good website.  A blog can be a chain of free thoguht (like this one) but if you want traffic that generates sales then take time over your content, research your area, don’t just google, look at print books, read newspapers make your content unique.

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