We take the name of our company very seriously! Results like the below are what make us live up to our name: Driving Profitability For Our Clients!!
Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
3
Feb 12
6
Jan 12
Great start to new year for DPFOC
We’re now on top of Google.ie for “seo services” to compliment our top ranks for “seo company” “seo companies” and many more. By any measure, we are now by far the largest and fastest growing SEO company operating in Ireland. We don’t intend to rest on our laurels. Rather, we are increasing our R and D spend and bringing more expertise into the company. This ongoing investment will ensure our clients continue to out-perform their rivals as DPFOC does its rivals.
11
Dec 11
Ro-Po means ROI on AdWords spend dramatically understated.
A study just released by a US based retail marketing firm shows that on average, for every $1 generated in online sales as a result of paid search advertising, $6 is generated in-store. Research online, purchase offline (Ro-Po) is the preferred means of buying for many people who gather information online and go to the shop armed with the information they need. The difficulty in tracking such sales often means that the true financial impact of paid search is understated. So, when analysing ROI on paid search campaigns, some efforts should be made to identify the Ro-Po revenue to ensure that informed decisions are made.
2
Dec 11
Yahoo Site Explorer Alternative
Anyone involved in SEO tends to rely on SEO Quake to do quick competitor analysis. It is a useful tool that makes ranking factors such as links to page, links to domain, domain age, presence of DMOZ, PR and more available for analysis right from within the SERP. However, the link data was fed from Yahoo Site Explorer and this was wound down last week meaning that link data on SEO Quake no longer works. However, there is a solution which Rahul Kharnokhya advised me of this morning – well done Rahul! In SEO Quake Preferences select “new” and paste the code:
[NAME]=Majestic SEO
[TITLE]=Maj SEO
http://api.majesticseo.com/getdomainstats.php?apikey=<enter API key here>&url={clean_domain}&exact=0
[URL_S]=https://www.majesticseo.com/search.php?folder=&q={clean_domain}
[REGEXP]=StatsRefDomains=”(\d+)”
This will add a new Majestic SEO icon to SEO Quake as circled below:
The number shown is the number of unique referring domains which is a far more important metric than total links. To get more data, click on the number and you will be redirected to Majestic SEO to see details such as total links, number of links from educational sites and more.
22
Sep 11
SEO A-Z Guide
Hemant, our in-house world leading SEO expert, asked me to share this great SEO A-Z guide with subscribers to our blog so that’s what I’m doing! For seasoned SEO professionals, there’s nothing new here but for those new to the discipline, it is a useful guide.
18
Aug 11
Click Through Rates From Different SERP Ranks
Depending on what study you read, you will get different guidance as to how much of the overall traffic for a particular key-phrase your site will get depending on its rank in SERP for that phrase. Most studies seem to suggest that sites will get at least a 400% boost in traffic from a particular key-phrase if they improve their rank from 2 to 1. This seems logical as most will click on the top result and substantially less would be expected to click on the second result. Interestingly, position number 10 is often believed to be more valuable than number 9 as people click on the bottom ranking page just before they had intended to move to page 2.
This morning, I decided to analyse the traffic from a particular key-phrase for a site that we manage. After a long stint in position 2, we have now secured top spot so of course I was interested to see how this impacted on traffic. As per the graph below, getting top spot has made a big difference but certainly not of the order of 400%. Based on cold hard data below, we see an increase in the region of 100% – hardly insubstantial but far less than the conventional wisdom would suggest.
As the above is just a single example, I decided to look at another example with similar characteristics. Again, after a lengthy spell in postion 2, we recently hit top spot. We achieved top spot on 18th July. Have a look at the graph below of traffic from this keyword.
You will note that before achieving top spot, we were struggling to break 45 visits in a single day but now that we have achieved top spot, we are approaching 90 daily visits from this phrase. However, daily visitor numbers, as per examples above have increased by about 100% so the difference between top spot and position 2 seems to be, based on the above, in the region of 100%.
I subsequently decided to look at how the above data fits in with the data provided from the Google Keyword Tool. This tool tells us that there are approximately 330 daily searches for the key-phrase in the bottom graph. As we are averaging around 150 daily visits, we are getting about half of the total demand for this key-phrase – the rest of the demand likely goes into Adwords listings. In the top graph, the Google Keyword Tool advises that there are approximately 500 daily searches for this phrase. Now that we’re top spot, we’re getting in the region of 100 visits per day or about 20% of total demand. This discrepancy is likely attributable to the fact that the keyword tool provides only loose estimates as opposed to actual numbers.
So, to sum up, the difference between top spot and position 2 is approximately 100%. From top spot, your site will hoover up around 20-50% of total demand so we know that from position 2 you can expect about 10-25% of total demand.
31
Jul 11
Companies Selling Google +1s
In the ongoing war between SEO companies trying to game Google’s algorithm and Google that just wants webmasters to produce great content to ensure the traffic / rankings will flow naturally, it was inevitable that the introduction of Google +1 would be another battle ground. No sooner had the feature been introduced than companies sprang up offering thousands of plus 1s from diverse IP addresses with guarantees of rank improvements. It is at this point hard to understand the logic of such vendors though as Google only improves the rankings of websites that have received +1s from someone in the searcher’s social network. So, thousands of plus 1s from India, the Philippines, Thailand etc are pretty much useless in terms of improving your website’s ranking. This won’t stop the fly by night charlatans trying to rip off decent companies by confusing them into buying these plus 1s.
5
Jul 11
“Bar For Sale” on Page 1
Bar Sport Franchise’s website has driven onto page one of Google.co.uk for “bar for sale” and “bar for lease.” These compliment phrases such as “bar franchise” and “pub franchise” already on page 1. These improvements are feeding nicely into traffic. Congrats to Scott and all the team at Bar Sport!
5
Jun 11
Google +1
I’ve just finished reading an interesting, if flawed, experiment on the Google +1 button. Check it out at http://www.seoeffect.com/blog/Effects-of-the-Google-%2B1-button-researched-download-the-whitepaper/ To be fair, the authors acknowledge the flaws but it is definitely compulsory reading for people interested in SEO.
The +1 button is Google’s answer to Facebook’s Like button and Google describes it as a method of marking a web page as “pretty cool.” It’s used for pages that are not so great or interesting that you might share them via Google Buzz (which is supposed to be used to start conversations) or retweet it; rather, you’re simply saying “this is pretty cool.” It is visible in two locations. Firstly, on web pages themselves where the webmaster adds the button allowing people to +1 a page while they are on it. Code to add the button is available from here:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/
For example, Raven Tools now have 70+1 votes. As I have +1′ed this page too when I hover over the +1 button, it says “You have +1′ed this page.” The second location on the net where the +1 button is visible is in Google SERPs (only in .com at present). So, if I go to Google.com and search for “Raven Tools” I see: 
You +1′d this. Interestingly, it does not say “You and 70 others +1′ed this.” However, if someone within my contacts had +1′ed it also, I would see this from within the SERP also. So, basically, in the SERP results Google only shows you who you know that +1′ed the page but on the page itself you can see the entirety of the +1s received, in this case 70.
One of the drawbacks is that in order to +1 a page, you must be signed into a Gmail account and must have a Google profile. Very few people have set up Google profiles; I guess more will now but I can’t see it happening en masse in the way people have flocked to Facebook. So, when you Like something on Facebook, pretty much everyone you know gets to see this via their newsfeed whereas +1ing something at present is like wispering to yourself “this is pretty cool” as no one else will hear you! This is Google’s challenge; the success of Facebook’s Like button comes from the critical mass of users that Facebook has registered on its site. Google’s equivalent, Google Buzz, got off to a disatrous start and hasn’t really recovered with the result that not many people use it.
From an SEO perspective, there are consequences. Google will rank sites that have received a +1 from someone within their social circle (Gmail/Google Talk contact list) higher than one that hasn’t. The idea is that if someone in your social circle has +1′ed a site, then this site is likely to be of interest to you. Also, if you see that someone in your circle has +1′ed the site (you can see this in search results), then you are more likely to click on it and so CTR will moveupward.
If we ask why is Google doing this, at its core, Google is looking for another metric to compliment the over 200 it already uses to tell it what sites are good. Google has already advised that it uses retweets / tweets andFacebook Likes as ranking metrics so this is another one to help them to understand the collective intelligence of the web.
Interestingly, there will be, at some point, Google Webmaster stats on the +1s you get which will make for interesting analysis as there will be some attempt to break down your +1s by demographics; I can’t see this being very effective as the data required to set up a Google profile is very limited. In my profile, I never put in my age, what I do for a living or even where I live. So, if I +1 a site, Google can’t really extract any useful demographic data. This contrasts with Facebook where people tend to divulge far more of their personal information.
Another interesting point is that, unlike link juice, for now, +1s do not transfer with 301 redirects; this would seem a contradicition. Why would Google allow link juice pass but not +1s?
While SEO Effect are to be commended for their work, we will be carrying out our own, far more scientific tests using “clean” sites whereby we can isolate the effect of +1s as we will ensure no one else knows about the site and so there will be no Twitter, link, Facebook or any other activity that would distort the results in the way the above experiment was. Inevitably, we will be recommending that all clients add the +1 button to their site as we will be doing tomorrow.
My predicition is that the +1 button will be a useful addition to the web and help Google to customise results to users based on what they’re social circle recommend.
The SEO world never rests!!!!!!!
23
May 11
Page 1 ain’t what it used to be!
Very often clients ask us “can you guarantee me page 1?” This is a fair question but is misguided. A better question would be “how much targeted traffic can you guarantee me?” The reason for this is that while many companies believe page 1 is the holy grail, in reality, even for the most sought after phrases a page 1 rank will add only a little traffic. Now that Google displays up to 15 results on page 1, the effect of just scraping onto the page is even less. I do wonder though if this recent update got a lot of SEO providers out of jail as they had contracts to achieve page 1 within a certain period – they just never said how many results would be on the page! In reality, it’s not until a top 3 ranking is achieved that the real benefits of an SEO campaign will kick in. So, if an SEO company guarantees you page 1, be sure to ask for what phrase and how much traffic can be expected as a result! Even better, ask them to show you Analytics data (with client’s permission of course) to back up their claims. Beware the fallacy of “page1 success.”