At the recent Wicklow CEB talk that I gave, I covered how it was very important to optimise websites for Google and as a result all search engines. I outlined that all the important steps for riding high on Google tie in neatly to blogging and so I advocated blogging as being crucial for a business to blog, if they have the time of course.
A cheat sheet was sent out to those that attended and here’s a bit of what was in it, which the SEO guys will no doubt nitpick 🙂
When optimising for Google:
Page titles mean a lot
Links mean a lot
Google likes new
Blogs fit well into this
Blogging tips:
Pick a niche, become the authority.
Network – IrishBlogs.ie, other bloggers in your niche.
Put your blog on your existing website.
Host the website in Ireland, if you want Irish traffic.
Regular posts – 1 per week for a year.
Additionally, writing a blog is not writing some kind of diary, it is a form of story telling, a way of you communicating with potential customers and explaining to them what your company or business philosophy is.
I don’t see why hosting the website in Ireland is important.
In order to appear in google country-specific searches, your website should either
i. use the tld of that country or
ii. be hosted in that country.
So, if you use a dot.com address for your website, and are hosted outside of Ireland, your website will not appear in google.ie searches for ‘pages from Ireland’.
Or at least thats how I understand it.
I hosted athenryac.com for a long time in the US, and never appeared in a ‘page from ireland’ search.
I investigated why that was, and found out the info above.
I moved to novara, and sure enough, in due course, the website would appear in those results.
Regards
Alan
I’m not convinced about the whole ‘hosting in Ireland for Google country-specific results’ thing. My face from back when I was fat currently appears as one of the offered image searches if you do a Google search for ‘fat person’, but ONLY in Ireland. The website it lives on is hosted on a server in Germany, and most links to it would probably be from my Blogger hosted blog. All .com ltds, btw. I think there must be more to the whole thing than just where you’re hosted.
It doesn’t actually matter where you are hosted or what tld to use for climbing the ranks. I have a few .com’s hosted in the U.S. that sit at #1 & 2 in Google Ireland, U.K, Australia etc. BUT when the Google user selects ‘pages from Ireland’ the host location comes into play. This seems to be different for image results though, as Robert has pointed out.
However, I do believe if you are targeting an audience in Ireland then hosting in Ireland and using a .ie makes perfect sense. Google and other Search Engines will be using geo-graphic locations even more in the future.
I’m no techy, but like the other commentators say, I don’t think hosting in Ireland is that important. Our web site (www.quovadis.ie) is hosted in Australia for cost and service reasons. On selected terms with “Ireland†only we come up on the first page of google results for various search terms.
We did however use a good web site designer who was also responsible for Search engine optimisation so may be there’s some other reason why we get high ratings.
Hi folks
I can tell you categorically that the perceived location of your server based on its IP address is considered when Google decides what pages to display on its country level properties. If you do a search for ‘widgets’ on Google.ie there will be a slight bias toward sites which Google has decided are Irish. This decision is based on two primary conditions that we know publicly – the cTLD and server IP. If your site is hosted on a .ie, then in the example above it would be considered to be ‘Irish’. Likewise, if your server is physically located on an IP which has been assigned to Ireland then that site will also be considered to be Irish. This really starts to show when you make the same search for ‘widgets’ but select ‘pages from Ireland’ then Google will only display sites which conform to one or both of the conditions outlined above – .ie cTLD or Irish IP.
Hope this explains things a bit more 🙂
Rgds
Richard