Tom Doyle

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Posts Tagged Search Engines

Getting your website listed on Google

Aug 3

Posted by Tom Doyle in Online Marketing

Another common question we are asked on a regular basis is, “How do I get my website listed on Google”?

Getting your website listed on Google, is probably one of the easiest things to do when it comes to marketing your website online. It takes only one of a few small steps to make Google’s search bots aware of your website. But just how quickly these search bots come crawling your website to include your website in their search results page depends on which route you take to try get it listed.

When you do eventually get your website listed on Google, remember that this is only half the battle. If you haven’t taken other steps to optimise your website, the likelyhood is that that your website will only be found if someone is looking for your brand or company name.

When 75-80% of people looking for a product or service they require, you can quickly establish that being found only for your business or brand isn’t going to be enough to get the kind of traffic you want.

Here are 4 simple ways of getting your website listed on Google:

  1. Use the Google Add URL page
    Google allows you to add your website address to Google using the following page http://www.google.com/addurl/. This is probably one of the slowest methods of achieving a listing on Google but it works none-the-less.

  2. Get links from other websites
    This method is by far the best way in which you can use to get listed on Google. Links from third party websites are the cornerstone of search engine optimisation, so if you have another website or know someone else who has one, ask them to put a link on their most popular page back to your website.

    It’s not enough to get a link from a page hidden deep down in someone else’s website. The trick is to find a page with a high Google PageRank*. Pages with a higer PageRank are generally crawled by Search Engines more regaularly than those with lower PageRank.

    *The PAGE (and not website) that you receive the link from should ideally have a Google PageRank of 4 or more. You can check a web pages Google PageRank, by downloading and installing the Google Toolbar (www.google.com/toolbar). You will need to edit the settings in order to turn it on.

  3. Socialise
    What I mean by this is that you should start letting people know about your website. Whether that be through posting your link on Twitter, Facebook or even commenting on your favourite blog or discussion forum it all helps to generate links back to your website.

    What I don’t mean is that you should go spamming the world with links back to your website. Using Twitter for example, you post a link to your website and ask your followers to the visit the website. Or when commenting on a blog article, include your website address as part of the posting process.

  4. Add your site to Search Directories
    If all else fails and you are finding it hard to get links back to your website, you can always look at getting links from web directories. There are thousands of search directories that allow you to add your link for free. The same methodology for getting links from other websites applies, look for PAGES with a PageRank of 4 or more.

    Here are a few Irish directories you could add your website to:
    www.search.ie
    www.armchair.ie
    www.browseireland.com

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Bing takes a larger bite of the Search Market

Jul 14

Posted by Tom Doyle in Online Marketing

REDMOND, WA - JULY 29: The Microsoft name is d...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Since it’s relaunch in June of last year, Bing has been well received by a lot of people inside and outside the search industry. This has been mainly due to added functionality and some improved usability features. On its launch, Bing took a small gain of market share in the search world, mainly at the expense of smaller, lesser know search engines. But now all their hard work seems to be paying off.

Yes it’s true, they are still a long way off the massive market share that Google owns, but this time they have managed to take a slice of Google’s share rather than the smaller search engines. This can only be seen as a great achievement by Bing, as much as we hate saying it – Microsft have done well to grab a little of Google’s dominant share.

According to comScore – Bing’s US search market share grew 88% in the past year. They know command a respectable 9.85% of the search market. This compares well with Google who have seen a fourth consective month drop in market share to 62.6%.

Another interesting report by comScore shows that Bings ad impressions and clickthroughs have also experienced a rise. On the other hand, Google and Yahoo‘s ad impressions and clickthroughs have either been flat or on the downward spiral.

For more on this report visit : http://econsultancy.com/blog/6240-comscore-bing-is-gaining-on-google#blog_comment_33174

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Advertising? Just Google ‘Advertising’

May 13

Posted by Tom Doyle in Online Marketing

You gotta love the way some companies advertise their business online. I love seeing a quirky ad that urges people to visit a website that promotes a brand or product. But there is one thing that we’d always recommend steering clear of when promoting a business online, that is relying on search results. Whether it’s the organic search results or even paid listings, basing an advertising campaign on the search results is such a bad idea.

Not so long ago I wrote about how Imagine were playing a dangerous and costly game with their ad ” WiMax, Google It”. The fact that Google Adwords is a pay per click system, means that you are ultimately paying for traffic that is pretty much useless. I guess you could easily say the same about TV adverts, but this is the web and one of the major benefits of it is that it’s quantifiable.

On my way home in the car this evening, I heard another advert that uses the Google verb. Yes, a company called “First Advertising” are running adverts on TodayFM and Newstalk in which the great employee suggests his boss should Google ‘Advertising’ and choose the first company that appears on the list.

Now for me, that is just suicidal! Nevermind that fact that no-one is in control of the search results other than Google, if I were in direct competition with First Advertising, I could easily turn on a Google Advertisement and be number 1 within minutes.

The other obvious scenario that they have clearly overlooked is the fact that if you do perform a search in Google (.ie) – it is Wikipedia that is actually the first result, in fact it’s not even in second place. Not until you choose “pages from Ireland” on the left hand side of the screen (which is harder to see with the new Google layout) do you actually see this company’s listing. Worse still, if you search on Google.com, they don’t appear on the first page at all!

On their website they state they are running these ads to celebrate their “clear dominance” of the Google search results. Dominance in a search results page that has no more than 2 other real competitors (pages from Ireland search).

I’m sure First Advertising are a great company, but they are just leaving so much open to chance that for me it’s a complete waste of money.  I wish them great success with the campaign and I really can’t wait to see how many of the top SEOs will try knock them from their perch!

Oh and of course…. If you want someone to look after your Google Advertising campaign, you could always contact me! :P

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Google gets new look, it’s nice but there are somethings I just don’t get!

May 7

Posted by Tom Doyle in Internet & Computers, Online Marketing

Google rolled out their new look to the Google.ie website this morning and it’s fair to say that most people probably didn’t even notice.

Google have decided to add a bit of life and colour to their much loved search engine, which makes it a little easier to spot some of the really cool features they added a little while ago. Things like the ability to search news, blogs, books and videos are now pretty much in your face and hard to miss, unlike the “show options” link they had in the past.

They’ve also decided to style the old looking “search” button and joined it with the actual search box on the inside pages. The logo is a lot more striking and clear than it has been in the past. Overall, they are pretty much subtle changes, but they have a nice fresh feeling effect to it.

There is one change that I really don’t get the concept behind and it’s this… If you visit the homepage of Google, e.g. www.google.ie and don’t move or click your mouse OR enter a search term, all you see on this page is the logo, the search box and the search buttons (as per image below).

However, when you do interact in some way with page, whether that be a mouse over, a click or enter a search term, the other elements fade (yes fade) in (as per image below)…

For the life of me, I just don’t understand why they’ve done this. Is it someone thinking it’s funky and cool??

This is appears to be a feature that is in complete contrast to the reasons given by Marissa Mayer as to why they value their copyright notice so much… Read why Google value their copyright notice so much

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It’s not all about your homepage!

May 6

Posted by Tom Doyle in Online Marketing, Web Design

Are Your Landing Page Forms Naughty or Nice?
Image by HubSpot via Flickr

In trying times, many businesses rightly try to save money where they can. One of the areas that possibly suffers most in a downturn, is the company website.

This is a real shame (of course I’d say that right), especially since your website is possibly the most cost effective tool that you have at your disposal to help promote your business.  And of course, if you decided to invest in a content management system, updating your website shouldn’t be too much hassle!

But what if you don’t have a CMS or you think your website is starting to look a little dated? A lot of companies think that by making “a few amendments” of their homepage will suffice. Generally they don’t understand the amount of work involved and they certainly don’t know how useful it will be when it’s all done. Unfortunately, making even the smallest amendments aren’t that straight forward. In fact, it can sometimes take longer to create a new homepage design with your additions than it was to create your homepage design in the first place!

Regardless of this, it must be noted that improving your website is not all about your homepage. We see this question on a regular basis:

“why does Google show my inside page when I search for X and not my homepage”

The simple answer is that Google will show the most relevant result to the search query performed. So therefore, if your contact page has more relevant information to the query, it will display this page above your homepage (in the majority of cases). For this reason, it is essential that you treat EVERY page as a landing page and not just your homepage.

If you thought you were doing an excellent job by creating many strong call to actions on your homepage, think again. You must include these call to actions on your inside pages too. You simply can’t tell where the user will land on your website after finding your website in the search engines. Of course, by studying your website statistics, you can see where people are coming from and what pages they are landing on after they have found you for a particular search. You should use these statistics to improve your call to actions on those landing pages.

So the next time you plan to make a “few small amendments”, try thinking of the bigger picture and how very likely it will be that you will have to make a lot more than just changes to your homepage!

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