Tim Ireland (UK) - SEO/Marketing Consultant

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Tim Ireland: SEO/Marketing Services and Profile

Services

Search Engine Optimisation

As an SEO engineer, Tim's main job is to research and compile a set of keywords (prioritised according to their projected ability to attract traffic) and make recommendations to the relevant design team about placement. His experience as a copywriter serves him well here, as these words have to:
- be 'scaled' for immediately achievable results
- contain more lucrative queries to be 'chased' via the generation of inbound links
- be woven into attractive, functional and motivating statements wherever they appear as a search result

The latter is especially important. The battle isn't to be in the top spot, but to be the most compelling choice amongst the top set of results. Aspects such as the Page Title and the Description META Tag are usually overlooked (or overworked) at this level, but as they are displayed following any given search query and precede click-through, they are often the first point-of-contact with a potential customer. The technical needs of the search engines need to be balanced with this major cultural need. That's why, even if a job may be 'purely' SEO-driven, everything still comes back to marketing.

Viral Marketing

Tim spends a lot of time observing what is of genuine interest to the online community and seeing what does and doesn't work with regards to viral agents and memes (of the professional or amateur variety). Many of the 'professional' executions you may see are viral in name only, often created by people with no knowledge of the audience and how, or indeed what, they like to share with each other. Tim provides a professional consultation service to help clients choose the best viral approach for your business, again from a technical and cultural point of view. Executions can range from Flash Games (such as this one for Corgi, which attracted 20,000 new visitors inside a month and quickly earned them an enduring top search result for 'model cars' in the UK) to a few lines of carefully chosen text (such as the Teens! page for Tom Watson, which resulted in 125,000+ unique visitors, press coverage in The Guardian, The Times, The Financial Times and even Private Eye, and helped the site to secure the top search result for 'labour mp' in Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Weblog Marketing

Almost every web user will inevitably fall into a pattern of interacting with set communities and seeking out new information via search engines. The new publishing phenomenon known as 'blogging' actually allows these areas to intersect in a way that could significantly improve overall traffic to your site. After years of active research and significant success in applying this dual marketing method to business and politics, Tim now offers a consultation/production service that may allow your company to not only attract the attention of this opinion-forming community, but actually integrate with them.

This is not a step to be taken lightly or blindly. Your choice of format, approach and ambassador(s) can make or break a project, and a strong level of commitment is required.

Profile

Personal Profile

Tim Ireland is a creative and somewhat idealistic chap who feels tortured on a daily basis by the power of the few and the ignorance of the many.

He was born in Australia, spent much of his youth enjoying the status of a 'gifted' student, and then went on to struggle through his formative years at a school full of children far more gifted than himself. This led to a bitterness that pollutes the core of his being to this very day.

On leaving school, he spent over 10 years carving out a career as a nightclub DJ, creating a show based almost entirely on music video and other forms of multimedia (mixed live and often produced in conjunction with the audience themselves). He has been known to claim that this is where he learned the hard-to-grasp basics of grass-roots marketing, but personal experience teaches us that what he mostly learned in this time was how to drink like a fish.

A tangential career of music video production and television advertising led to his almost accidental discovery of the Internet, where he has chosen to dwell ever since.

Professional Profile

He then moved to the UK and took part in what has now become known as the 'dotcom' era. His most notable successes in this time resulted from his participation in the development of Tesco.net and Tesco.com

Tim Ireland is now best described as a marketing consultant (people often use the word 'guru' around him, but this causes him to blush like a schoolgirl, so please avoid doing so yourself). His main focus is on search engine optimisation, particularly in Google.

However - and it gives him a headache to have to explain this too often, so please do pay attention - succeeding in Google requires an approach that addresses both the technical and the cultural. The people talk; Google listens. This dynamic exchange has a pronounced effect on your search engine results, so your relationship with your customers/audience is just as important as the arming or configuration of your web presence.

Political Profile

Marketing and politics are so closely related that, before he really knew what the hell was going on, Tim had invented and developed the world's first interactive manifesto, run a long and hard-fought campaign for Tony Blair to introduce an effective and useful email facility (right down to drawing up specifications for a viable service) and produced the first weblog by a Labour MP and the first weblog by a Conservative MP.

Despite all of this, Tim Ireland has no plans to run for office. He recently came to the conclusion that he could win an election without difficulty, but has neither the desire nor the patience to tackle the role itself.