Archive for 'SEM'
Magic Wand SEO – How to get good SERP with no effort
I have quite a lot of request of people that seem to slowly become aware of the importance of a good Ranking in Search Engine Page Results (SERP). Nearly all of them say something like “I’d be interested in getting a quote from you for some SEO work” or similar. This is what I call “Magic Wand SEO”. But unfortunately my wand exploded and my spellbook was destroyed last time I tried to tamper with Googles free will.
To make it clear: This kind of SEO is an illusion. SEO is a time and money consuming, highly specialised task, which will take up to 3 month before you may notice the results. By results I do not mean just a rise in visitors to your website or even less relevant things like the rise of your websites page rank.
There is only one real and relevant measurable for good SEO:
The rise in conversions and there for rise in sales. They do not have to be online, SEO can and should affect your offline sales too.
No Guarantee
Another important fact is that there cannot be any guarantee for success. And if there is success the question remains do I get a Return Of Investment (ROI) and when. The Google algorithm for ranking the results consists of something between 100 and 200 parameters, that keep changing frequently. Any company promising a SERP1 result are impostors.
Why am I just talking about Google?
Simple: Google has an effective market share of over 93%. The remaining 7% are shared by Yahoo, MSN and others. Of course “the others” have to be considered, but I don’t think they have to be mentioned 
How to organise heavy workload – Part 1 – The Morning …
So far the recession has spared me. In the contrary, the goals I have set myself for this year are likely to be dwarfend if the pace of the first two months of this year continues. About a week ago, Gordon from eWrite wrote a post about “Learning the time management thing“. Joining this, I want to tell you about my approach to the same problem.
Beginning the day
My day usualy begins before dawn, as I like the peace and quite for reading my mails and news. No phone, no skype or icq and even twitter is kinda quite. Just me and my mug of sweet and strong caffee latte.
First thing of course are my mail. I use googlemail with some labs and greasemonkey extensions. I addition to the not-to-bad gmail spam filters, i also have some tight server filters, which keep my spam load pretty low at roughly 150-200 per day. About three or four spam show up in my inbox, while I have about the same amount of false positives in my junk folder, which i check and sweep regularely two to tree times a day.
I organise my mail by using the “Superstars” and “Custom Label Colours” from GMail Labs, every client has its own star/color. Importantly I only keep current mails i have to look after in my inbox, everything else is moved to the archive. To consequently do so, I use GMail Labs “Send & Archive”. I addition to that I use the Greasemonkey “Folders4Gmail” plugin and some Gmail Filters to label my mail corresponding to my customers, so I have easy access, even when archived. I also use the Gmail search function a lot.
Next, I read my rss-feed. I follow a lot of SEO related blog and even if the subjects seem to be similar or comming up again and again in regular intervalls, i still find some interesting posts in between. I have also set up some google alerts, to monitor my presence on the web. When I find a post I like and want to read it later, I usually grab it with Evernote. If its a new blog I find worth following, i use my google reader and when it’s just an URL with e.g. a tool of some sort, I bookmark it with delicious.com. I use the same procedure, when I look through the twits I get over night.
After having cought up with the over nights stream of information, I move on to organising my day …
Submitting your URL to Google, Yahoo & MSN
Posted on Februar 9, 2009, under Knowledgebase, SEM, SEO, SERP.
The Three big Search Engines Google, Yahoo and MSN have improved their services for submitting and monitoring URLs in the last years. The probably better known of both are the Google Webmaster Services. MSN Live has setup a similar but far less comprehensive service called Live Search Webmaster Center, so does Yahoo with its Yahoo Site Explorer. All three services require a login. You can use the Google Service, by registering you Google Account to this Service. To use the Microsoft Service you will need a Windows Live ID and for Yahoo login with your Yahoo Account.
To submit or update your URL you should use the URL Submit/Update Form (no login required). A better way to tell Google about your page/site is to submit a xml-sitemap. You can do so by login into the Google Webmaster Services. If you have authenticated your site by adding a special metatag
<meta name="verify-v1" content="unique_id" />
to the <head> section of your index page, you will be able to upload a sitemap for that site. The unique_id will be generated by Google, depending on your sitename. Alternatively you can upload a special file to the root folder of your webserver. To learn more about Sitemaps Google provides very detailed information. Once you have a sitemap generated and submitted you might need to tell Google that it has changed, when you have added, deleted or modified pages. Some systems like e.g. Wordpress, do so automatically if you have the right plugin installed, some do not. So to “ping” Google to refetch your sitemap you can use the following:
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url
where sitemap_url is the URL of your sitemap.
MSN Live
The same procedure for submitting / updating information about your URLs and sitemaps apply to MSN Live. You can submit an URL to MSN Live, tell Microsoft to fetch your xml-sitemap and “ping” the service to refetch you sitemap, by using the following:
http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=sitemap_url
Where sitemap_url is the URL of your Sitemap. MSN also requires the authentification of your site, you will have to place a special metatag
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="mail_id" />
to the <head> of your index page, where mail_id is generated from the email adress you registered the page with. Alternatively you can upload a special file to the root folder of your webserver.
Yahoo
Last but no least, also Yahoo provides the possibility to add an URL to Yahoo. You can also register your site with the Yahoo Site Explorer and upload an xml-sitemap. Here too the authentification of your site is required and you can do so by adding
<meta name="y_key" content="unique_id" />
To the <head> section of your index page, where unique_id is generated by Yahoo. If you want to ping Yahoo to fetch your sitemap, use the following format:
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ updateNotification?appid=api_id&url=sitemap_url
Where api_id is your Yahoo Developers ID and sitemap_url the URL to your sitemap. Alternatively you can upload a special file to the root folder of your webserver.
Free SEO advice using IGOpeople
After following the rush and registering with IGOpeople today, we have decided to give Free SEO Advice using this service. We will answer SEO and SEM related questions. If you have a website, that is not performing as you wish, let us know and we will have a quick look. All you have to do is register and contact us through our IGOpeople – Achill Online Internet Services -Profile-Page
If you want a more detailed analysis we are happy to offer you a
Website Health Check
for a promotional price of
129,- € incl. VAT
This offer is valid until the 30th of June 2009. The Price for the Website Health Check can be set off against any optimisation we carry out.
Ferndale Fine Dining Restaurant & Luxury Guesthouse
Posted on August 1, 2008, under References, SEM, SEO.
www.achill-fine-dining.com
The redesign of the former www.ferndale-achill.com needed to reflect the changing decorations of the restaurant, so we developed 4 different design – Winter, Summer, Halloween and Christmas – which can be switched in an online admin panel.
The Design is XHTML Stict with CSS-based Layout.
In addition to our standard Onsite-SEO, Google Analytics & Webmasters, we also ran a 3 Month Adwords Campaign and did some Offpage SEO. By this we were able to get the visits for the month of January 2009 back up to the level of September 2008, which gives the webpage a good start for the very seasonal business.
