If you are one of the 3 to 4 people who read this blog you will see that I often say that I am not an SEO expert. There are plenty of these in Cork and Ireland who do it as a full time job and apply full time energy on a daily basis to work with their customers to help them get optimum page ranking.
However I do have extensive knowledge on the subject and can optimise your website to ensure that when Google crawls your site you have a significantly better chance of getting higher ranking. There are hundreds of thousands of websites who do not have the simple basics done to their sites to make sure that they are giving themselves the chance of being found.
Looking at the so called SEO experts that are on the Cork and Irish markets and observing what they are offering shows that their claim to be experts is often overblown.
SEO – Is it an Overused Term?
Well actually that’s not the plan. I will confess I have developed many many sites that will never rank in their niche and have no hope of doing so as they did not want to put the effort into SEO or pay someone to do the work for them or listen to my advice on how spend the extra time to make their site search engine ready. Understandably at the time it was a matter of budget. Even worse however are sites that think that merely by having a site guarantees that they will be found for a very specific search terms without any due diligence in even on page content.
From now on I am going to offer all my customers what I am going to call in my proposals “Give Yourself a Chance of Being Found in Search Engines” section. This natty phrase which I think rolls off the tongue much more easily than SEO – (try it GYCBFSE) will outline in detail what they can do or pay me to do to give them at least some chance of being found after their site is developed. Below I will actually give you a taste of some of the steps and tasks involved.
GYCBFSE Uncovered
There are hundreds of thousands of 5-10 pages sites out there that live on page 4+ on Google that with some thought and effort could be bumped up to at least to page 2 and perhaps page 1 for specific search terms in their niche if they put the time and effort into their site. Here are some of the tasks that I (and you if you have the expertise) can do to help in your GYCBFSE plan.
- Determine the 10 keywords are that you want (or more correctly should try) to rank for. Google Keywords will help you with this.
- Structure your site so that it has a sensible easy layout to allow Google look at it and understand your sites message
- Write useful content for 3-4 of these keywords and either put it in a static HTML page in the above structure or use a content management system that makes this content creation easier.
- Read the content again and take out any marketing rubbish, weasel words, or filler phrases. Your content should be refreshing, easy to read at early secondary school level at least and not put the reader to sleep (wake up reader!!)
- Repeat these steps over a 3-4 month period at least 2-3 times per week. It does not always have to be new content and you can always update existing content.
- Look at your Google Analytics and see which of these pages works well for you and fine tune and edit these pages. If you don’t have a access to your Google Analytics reports then address this immediately.
- If there are pages that aren’t getting any traffic revisit, edit, fine tune.
Now all of the above are what I would call the tip of the GYCBFSE iceberg but it just astonishes me how few people don’t bother or care about it. Now you can do it and spend 3-7 hours per week at it or pay me your only GYCBFSE expert in Cork to do it for you with your help (yes I need your help it does involve some conversations and agreements from you!)
Now unlike some SEO experts I will not give you a rock solid guarantee that you rank on page 1 but as I am now a self proclaimed a GYCBFSE expert (the only one in Cork at the moment) I can ensure for a relatively modest fee that you can then work with an SEO expert to ensure that you will be many many steps ahead of your competition and get this coveted page 1. I think I will give the sash a bit of a wear for a few days in the meantime while I field the calls.
Content alone may not be enough but with excellent content and good structures you are heading in the right direction.
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One Comment
Great article – and it highlights all of the low-priced (and low performance) SEO’s advertising their their magical services. Good SEO requires a good plan, some expertise and finally – commitment and patience. We have one client who has steadily cultivated, over several years, organic links, never resorting to black-hat or link farms etc. They now have over 50,000 backlinks – they had a plan, hired a reputable white-hat expert, and stuck with it – they regularly rank as the first result for their keywords.