I cannot believe a company is producing designs like these and expecting people to PAY for them. One thing will say you can dish out the bullshit.

I would expect you to pay me for loss of business, if you wanted to put one of those designs as my own site .

You forgot to SHOUT ‘FREE’ over and over again.

When are you going to grow up and stop already with your ‘Google Rapid Inclusion system’. You seem to believe your own bullshit now?

And while you’re at it – why not act ethically in your marketing collateral and drop references to ‘Free Google Traffic’ on your testimonials page? It’s quite obvious from your newly created PDF that only Omniserve.ie receives the free Google traffic, and that in fact your clients receive free referrals from Omniserve.ie.

The saddest thing of all is that you probably have a great product, but you’ve made the poor decision (IMO) to dress it up with SEO bullshit.

Or maybe all publicity is good publicity?

Hi Chris,

A very well informed post re Google algorythm. Please bear in mind however that the E400 is NOT for traffic from Google (our Google Rapid Inclusion system is free) but is for the following:

1. The domain registration with Digiweb
2. The hosting of email and the site with Digiweb
3. The CM4all licence to enable customer to edit/add new pages through a control panel.
4. The building of the website in front of the customer’s eyes over a Webex connection
5. The time with our consultant who trains the small business person in how to use the control panel to make changes/add pages etc.
6. Basic search engine configuration so that the most important on page factors are correctly set up for Google

Regards Eoin

Michele has a point about the average punter not giving a damn about whether a search is “in Ireland” or not. I think most of us bang the search term into the search box and then expect the correct hit.

However, a part of Google’s algorithm does use location of the searcher as a determiner in the search results given. And they try to “help” you use the local version. So if I search from Ireland for a particular product or service at least some of the results will likely be local to Ireland, unless I’ve chosen otherwise. Another determiner of ranking is the location of the links coming in. I guess the links in this case are also coming from a site with an Irish top domain hosted on a server based in Ireland. These are also taken into the equation. You can see this very clearly if you search for relatively international products from different locations and on different local versions of Google. The results vary hugely for different variations of search, even the web search is a localised version.
For instance, I did a search on Google Sweden http://www.google.se/search?hl=sv&q=blackwater+band&btnG=Google-s%C3%B6kning&meta=
Note the local Swedish results topping the listings and I’ve chosen “the web”.
Then on Google.com after Google really tried to cajole me into using the local version.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=blackwater+band&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=
Black water band turns up first on placing 17 for the Omniserve listing, place 37 linked from an Aussie article, and then this blog has the next link on place 39. I could have missed something there as it’s a bloody long list
But this shows you how hard it is to predict and influence rankings. If Eoin has managed to put Blackwater band in top position for local Ireland searches then fair play. Calling it a “Rapid submission tool” is putting the spin on it a bit too much. But there are a couple of things to keep in mind here:
People searching for “Blackwater band” from Ireland should be able to find the site anyway. It’s a keyword without any competition. Now say it was “best Irish band” or something along those lines, or say you want a No. 1 1 ranking for “U2″. Then you have a challenge. But as Eoin mentions people choosing to search locally are better qualified leads as they are probably looking for the Irish Blackwater band.
What percent of users are actually searching/getting results from the local Googles? I’ve heard 20% before but am not sure what the definition of “local search” is there, does anyone on this discussion have the figures maybe? If you do, that would be cool to know. That figure has a direct impact on the value of ranking No1 and No2 for Blackwater band in Ireland.
The number of searches indicates the value of the keyword: 210 searches on average per month in Ireland is what the Google keyword tool tells us. Knock that off over a year and Eoin should be driving about 400-600 visits to that site per year. How much is a visitor worth?
Once you know that then you know if it’s worth 400 euro or not.
Chris

Now of course if someone has conducted extensive, impartial studies on this (ie. asking a large group of typical users and not just their family and friends) then I will be “all ears”…

Michele