How important is .IE

eirman

I've very little SEO experience and only do occasional websites.
A small builder friend of mine has a new website called ******construction.com

How important is it to switch to ******construction.ie for SEO purposes?
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Second question ......

At the moment he only has mentioned the North East as being the area he works in, which is fine in itself.
However I would like his site to be found if someone searches for a terms such as "Dundalk Builder" or "Builders in Louth"

In recent years I've read that metatags have been depreciated by google and that H1 labels are more important.
What's your experience of the 'keyword' and 'description' meta tags.
What about the alternative text on images?

I know that backlinks are very important and I'm going to set up as many relevant ones as possible.
I'm going to manually register a sitemap with some search engines.
Other than that, I'm somewhat at a loss as how to make SEO friendly webpages.

I'd appreciate any suggestions.

smash

For the .ie domain, I'd say it's important and for the sake of a€50 or whatever he might as well get it. For SEO and your question about H1 etc, here's an interesting article: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/2014-important-h1-tag-seo/106613/

tricky D

A .ie does have some positive influence, but be aware that setting up Google My Business [ http://www.google.com/business/ ] properly can give a good bump for local oriented search.

H1's and other headings remain a factor just learn about how to use them properly order-wise.

Meta descriptions matter for controlling the result descriptions but also check out og:, twitter: etc. metas for controlling Social Media citations [ http://moz.com/blog/meta-data-templates-123 ].

Ignore meta keywords completely, they have no positive value and Bing is the only one who pays attention to them and only to penalise keyword spamming.

Alt should be used naturally.

Make sure your backlinks are good ie. natural, organic and relevant (which remains the general mantra for good SEO).

Otherwise read up on stuff at moz and the likes of searchenginejournal but beware of advice which might be out of date as tweaks and experiments are always being made.

eirman

Thanks for your input smash .... much appreciated.

An excellent and comprehensive response tricky D .... many thanks.


I think page titles are also important.

jmcc

The Irish market is now .ie dominant. This means that people here expect that an Irish business will have a .ie website rather than a .com website. The .com domain count on Irish hosters has been falling over the past year while the number of .ie domains seems to be increasing. There's a psychological aspect of using .ie that most of the US SEO commentators don't understand and that's the effect where people strongly identify with their ccTLD and don't have to remember the extension (such as .ie). Thus a descriptive domain such as trade+location.ie could be far more memorable in a ccTLD than in a generic like .com.

Stay away from meatbot operations offering cheap backlinks. Concentrate on backlinks from local and Irish sites. Keep any links on-topic and closely aligned to the site's function. Don't do reciprocal links with off-topic sites in other countries. If your site is local, then it should have a local links profile.

Regards...jmcc