Latest research showing how Irish users are utilising Search Engines, which search engines they favour and how they perceive and use PPC ads in search results.

In a sleepy little village in the Garden of Ireland lives a quintessential pipe smoking senior citizen.

With a dark secret

Everyone knows that Irish property is having a (much needed) bad patch at the minute.

Will the Irish Times have to write down some of the purchase price paid for myhome.ie back in August 2006?

Some interesting figures about Online marketing spends in Europe during 2007.

If you work Online in Europe I imagine you have a good idea of the main findings…

While 2007 might be the year that SEO went seriously mainstream, I think 2008 will be the year of the conversion optimisation.

And if you want to kick start your testing you could do a whole lot worse than follow Google’s lead. Read on to learn more…

I was lucky enough to use Gatineau yesterday at Microsoft’s campus in Lepardstown Dublin.

DaveN said it’s KICK ARSE AWESOME. And you know what? I think it really will be…

Ireland has been bereft of decent Search Engine usage statistics for a long, long time.

Thanks to Search Marketing World 2007 and Amarach Consulting we now have a glimpse into the Search Engine usage behaviour of Irish surfers.

Social Media is a fascinating strand of the marketing mix, and the number of companies that are leveraging Social Media Marketing (SMM) is increasing dramatically.

Yesterday I heard a radio ad that surprised me quite a bit, and today I’ve come across some fantastic data that shows just how impressive SMM can be when you get it right.

It appears that Alexa is now reporting additional statistics including country origin and country-level rank.

Now if only one of the big search engines would just give us some Alexa-style statistics…

Not sure if I’m just imagining things, but I think both Google Analytics and Google Reader have been behaving differently recently…

More of my madness? Buddha knows.

What are you going to do if the Overture Keyword Tool really does dies? Well you could switch over to the new improved Wordtracker Free Keyword Tool.

But if keywords equate to revenue then maybe it’s time to try out one of the professional tools on the market. More details within

Did you know that the META Description tag can be one of the most important factors dictating whether searchers will actually visit your website?

But META descriptions aren’t useful for attracting search engines, they’re useful for attracting the people who use search engines. Read on to learn how your META tags can get you more traffic (and I’m pretty sure you aren’t thinking what I’m thinking).

New report from McAfee SiteAdvisor on study comparing the safety risks of the sites listed in the top results for 1,500 search queries.

Sometimes the things you stumble upon are the most interesting.

Someone has set up a tracker for the main Irish property websites, and the charts are quite fascinating.

the Golden Spider was awarded to Moviestar.ie for its performance, as a functioning site in addition to design, innovation, content, navigation, technology, interactivity and ease of use.

Hmmm….

Should we be taking far more interest in Internet and Mobile video?

Well, according to an ICM poll for the BBC TV, time is being forfeited for these new emerging technologies.

We all want them. Visitors have a better experience. Searchers find what they’re looking for. Site owners enjoy more prosperity. And the Internet community have something to pour praise on. So what’s holding Ireland’s websites back?

The full results from the accessibility and standards compliance analysis of all websites short-listed for the 2006 Golden Spiders awards.

Notes to accompany my analysis.

Here are the results for those websites short-listed in categories 13 – 16.

These results cover websites short-listed in categories 9 through 12.

This is the second batch of results for the analysis of the Golden Spiders short-listed websites.

This sample includes the Best Web Design Agency category.

The Golden Spiders are billed as Ireland’s ‘Oscars’ for the Internet industry. With over 100 websites nominated I decided to take a look at the accessibility and coding standards of each site.

Here’s the first batch of results.

Unconditional Google love is something we all want. Let’s face it, Google is one of the top referrers in the world so keeping her happy has to be one of the most important jobs of any webmaster.

Here are my 10 top tips to getting and keeping that Google love.

E-mail spam is a scourge. SEO e-mail spam makes me particularly nauseous.

And when it’s Irish born? Thank you but www.amitan.ie does quite nicely without your kind offer.

RSS is a really great transport for delivering your content to the widest possible Internet audience. Unfortunately it appears that no one bothered to tell Ireland’s top media and news organisations.

Looking for a quick and easy way to combine multiple Google analytics accounts?

Well look no further – here’s a quick 5 step guide.

Discovering Google search volumes for any given phrase is a notoriously difficult task. Google offers a number of tools to help webmasters and site owners to research the keyword phrases people are interested in.

If you were to ask 100 people in the street ‘Which Irish companies have benefited the most form the economic boom over the past decade?‘ I’m quite sure what the majority of the responses would be.

It’s unusual to think that probably the richest and most powerful indigenous sector of the Irish economy is so poorly represented on-line.

Previously invite-only, Google Analytics has now opened to the masses for business.

Well after some gentle persuasion of MySQL the AOL-data.tgz files have surrendered some interesting, if not wholly unexpected, information about the relative strengths and click through rates of SERP positions.
The dataset contained 36,389,567 search queries with 19,434,540 clickthroughs. While we all knew the importance of the top 3 positions in the Google SERPs, this [...]

A number of tools are appearing allowing the interrogation of the released AOL material:
AOL Search Database (currently under heavy load)
and (IMO) a more superior site:
DontDelete (new domain so you may have to access via 63.212.167.185)
I am currently indexing the entire dataset myself (2.1GB of search goodness) and hope to bring you some Irish related queries [...]

[EDIT] You can find some mined gems from this data over at the plentyoffish blog (and while your there, learn about a guy who makes >$10k PER DAY from Adsense on his free dating site).
According to this post AOL released, and very, very promptly removed, the entire search records of 500,000 users collected over a [...]

More Matt Cutts Video Blogs about updates, dupe content and PageRank amongst others.

Just noticed that my Google Analytics accounts now have 10 profiles per account.
I use Analytics for all my projects and having more profiles per account means less logging in and logging out
Now all I have to do is figure out a way to consolidate these accounts without losing historic data
Great news [...]