Sisterly Advice For SEO
May 4, 2012 at 9:40 am
My sister in Australia got in touch recently asking for my advice about SEO. I no longer do SEO but I was able to give her good advice on how to choose somebody. I’m sharing the tips below:
Getting your site highly ranked on Google is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It’s a very tricky part of internet marketing and very labour intensive if it’s done well, so it can tend to be quite expensive. Anyone who tells you they can get your site ranked using software, or quickly, or if they are very cheap, walk away. You don’t want to mess with Google – if they catch you trying to trick them into ranking your site, they can blacklist you which is a fate worse than death. Usually you can expect it to take up 3-6 months to get a good ranking.
So my first message is – you won’t be able to do this effectively by yourselves. You need to engage a local SEO company to do this for you. I say local because they are more likely to be in tune with the language and search terms that your consumers will use. Even when I’m providing Internet Marketing training, I’m very clear on this – you can’t learn how to do it yourself in a day’s traning, it is more of an art than a skill to get a site number 1 on Google. The rules of the game change all the time.
Assuming you engage a firm to help you – what you should be looking for when making your selection:
- Ask them to give you a list of sites they have optimised / ranked. Go and search for those business on Google or Bing. But don’t search for the company name, anyone can get a listing on their own name, go and search for them using a keyword that a service user might use. If you find them, great. If not, walk away.
- When they describe their process – they should be using a mix of on page optimisation and off page link building. Hosting matters too.
- They should involve you in the keyword selection process. Don’t go with the first set of words they come back with – they will be the words that are easiest for them to rank you on. You need to be ranked on the words your clients will use. It’s about reaching a compromise between the two because obviously you can’t expect to get a number 1 ranking on the keyword “therapy”.. but you might be able to get a number 1 on “family therapy sydney” It’s about getting into the head of your consumer and coming up with the words that they would use – you are best placed to kick that off, your SEO company can expand that list and fill it out and include variations, and spelling mistakes, and other brand names, etc to get you a good keyword selection list.
I hope that helps.
Tags: search engine optimisation, seo ireland
Sing Don’t Shop!
October 16, 2011 at 8:51 pm
Flashmob Friday has moved to Sunday and now with local super-shopping centre power! Dundrum Town Centre today, “The Hallelujah Choruas”. Thanks to Miriam Joyce for sharing, she’s in here somewhere…
I recommend flicking to 2.30 to avoid the setting up bit!
All About The Analytics
February 28, 2011 at 4:21 pm
Flash Mob Newsflash
November 2, 2010 at 11:39 am
You know how I love to post great uplifting Flashmobs on a Friday? Well T-Mobile have been at it again and I can’t wait til Friday to share this. A little X Factor-esque but what the hell…
Note that it’s had 997, 534 views on Youtube less than a week after it happened.
Tags: flashmob, tmobile flashmob
Behind Every Great Woman…
October 29, 2010 at 7:15 am
is another great woman? : )
Very happy to announce the launch of Joan Burton’s new site today. This one landed 5 days after Airt was born and I thought it worthy enough to come out of maternity leave retirement for it. I didn’t want Joan falling into the hands of someone who wouldn’t give her a fabulously stylish and user friendly WordPress blog site.
Kick off meeting happened 3 weeks after Airt was born. I was very excited to be out – in town, with make-up on! Things got started with the wonderful John helping me…
Then the economy got in the way
You’d want to be living under a stone not to be aware of the busy summer Joan and her team have had, the meetings in the Dept of Finance, the many many interviews…. all this time I was living in fear that an election would be called and then we really wouldn’t have time to finish this newest addition to the Labour Party suite of sites.
The good news is that the election hasn’t happened yet and the Budget is still some weeks away
So in this time of relative calm, Joan’s team have signed off on the site and it’s gone live today. A select group of bloggers enjoyed a sneak peak last night and by all accounts, it’s a hit.
I think we’ve managed to make Labour Party red seem a little softer, but the messaging is still as hard-hitting as ever. See for yourself. Visit Joan’s site today.
How (Twitter) Influential Are You?
October 5, 2010 at 8:35 am
Came across this nice tool for measuring your Twitter influential-ness – Klout. Type in your name and it gives you a nice score that shows your true reach, who you influence, and who you are influenced by, and has a nice little summary text bit that places you in a nice chart.
Tags: twitter reach
testing testing
March 15, 2010 at 1:52 pm
Be Afraid Be Very Afraid
March 8, 2010 at 7:48 am
Were you, like me, getting a bit tired of all the warnings about ‘social media experts’ last year? It seemed as if there was more written about beware of dodgy experts than there was about the space itself.
However this morning some folks on Twitter were talking about this guy – The Twitter King – Social Media Expert. His site is definitely written to the American market. He makes big bold claims about making $50,000 in just weeks and guess what? He’ll show you how….
I would just like to say that I have never heard of the man. Never come across him on Twitter in all the years I’ve been active there. Never met him at a single event. Never heard of any of his clients. And I would file this guy in the same camp as the dodgy dating techniques seminars of last year.
Facebook App for UK Market
March 4, 2010 at 7:04 am
I was on the hunt for Irish Facebook app developers a little while back. The reason why was because I needed to get an app developed for a competition running on the Discover Ireland GB fan page. It’s now live – and Betapond (the winning company) were great to work with and pulled this out of a hat in record time. It’s great to see one’s ideas translated into action – with just the right amount of tack factor involved!
Check it out here - but remember, you can’t enter if you’re not in England, Wales or Scotland.
Not All Flashmobs Are Good
January 29, 2010 at 8:30 am
Corporate America – please do not hijack our beloved flashmobs! Cringe-inducing performance on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange last Friday (22 Jan 2010). How not to do Flashmobs:
