Sample search engine optimization (SEO) report for the publishing industry in digital transition.

1. Search Engine Optimisation Report for “Ur Dream
Home’s” urdreamhome.ie
James Dellinger
Dublin City University
M. Sc. Electronic Commerce (Business)
21/11/2011

2. Executive Summary
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reports are often done on at least a quarterly or monthly basis for
Internet based sites and publishers. The current status quo of your website will throws the seriousness of
your brand and product into doubt. Sell your readers the modern living lifestyle online.
Normally, one does not dive into the big question ‘digital strategy’ in an SEO report. They are a generally
bit more of a look at the mechanics of traffic delivery via search engines, but in examining urdreamhome.ie
it is quite clear there is currently no coherent digital strategy for the digital presentation of ‘UR Dream
Home Magazine,’ content. This is a double-edged sword of a good and a bad thing. The good news is your
site is doing very little things wrong, incorrectly or poorly, but the bad news is that it really is not doing
anything at all interesting online or well. This SEO report may feel a bit ‘bulldogged,’ because of the sheer
lack of data that would normally be analyzed. There is only so much SEO can bring to a website that both a
coherent digital strategy standing behind it and basic design features to court readers interest and time on
site. This is a fix that must occur first.
The content is not the problem, it is fantastic. However, it is hidden and inaccessible for the average reader.
Hiding good content in search engine inaccessible PDF’s does not count as online publishing. There are
many excellent things that can be done with PDF’s so their content can be enjoyed, but current none of
these are being deployed on urdreamhome.ie. The use of mymagonline.com’s pdf viewer must go. This site
is so poorly executed a reader can’t even sign themselves up to receive a paid print edition of the magazine
or give an email for updates about new issues. This is a fairly easy fix with deployment of both scribd.com
and Pagesuite’s pdf services.
Your magazine has staff members that blog, but not for your publication and possibly even on work time.
Staffers and freelancers have links to their personal sites on the urdreamhome.ie staff page, but none of
them link to their employer’s website urdreamhome.ie. Generally, when I have seen this in the past it is
because they have never been asked to link to their work site and they would or they are not proud of their
employers website, but fearful of reprisal for saying so. Your employees must like and want to interact on
the urdreamhome.ie website about their content, they produce for the magazine and build relationships with
their readers. This is a harder fix as it means changes to the current responsibilities of staff.
Having worked with publishers in the past I understand the difficultly in deciding the path of a coherent
digital strategy for those coming from traditional publishing. Your contents success online is not competing
with your print version they are for different people. The continued erosion of the advertising and
subscription model month after month does not help; however, I am confident that there are many
readership and financial growth opportunities for this brand. I will be explaining in detail further in this
report as to how to get there. The risks in maintaining the status quo are much worse. The year 2012 is
upon us at this stage being online with a 90s web 1.0 website alone is no longer the bare minimum. Trying
to do digital well is now the bare minimum. Not everyone is succeeding at this, but making a good faith
effort are respected and noticed by readers online as audiences build and return feedback. The new
Facebook and twitter page are a start, but the lack of real interactivity with the audience makes its value to
your online strategy unleveraged and feel just tossed on the wall.
Its time to decide what the point and purpose future of urdreamhome.ie is and what the strategy to
accomplish the goals will be. Its time to decide if this brand wants to compete within its own geographic
space online and its chosen subject matter verticals. Currently, it does neither, based on my research and
analysis.
After your digital strategy is addressed and you know where you want to go, secondly web design and
digital content deployment and content freshness must be addressed. Some aspects of this issue will be
addressed in this SEO report, but again, doing this correctly is a precursor to making SEO of use to your
site and improve traffic and audience interactions. For this report we have used a variety of SEO tools,
which are defined in the appendices.

3. Detailed Report
I have chosen three other websites in the similar market space of contemporary homes and the lifestyles
and furnishings associated with it. I chose ‘dwell.com,’ ‘freshome.com,’ and ‘homeanddesign.com.’ I chose
these primarily American websites for one simple reason, they are dominating your readership vertical
subject matter online even in your .ie based search versions of Google Yahoo! and Bing and if you happen
to be a reader of these sites in Ireland you may also be interested in urdreamhome.ie, which is more locally
focused. I also chose them, because they each have a different unique digital strategy, which should be
studied and contrasted when formulating urdreamhome.ie’s new strategy. Freshome.com is purely a digital
operation and site is designed with subject matter vertical within the space in mind. However, Dwell and
Home and Design are both glossy traditional magazines, which show what can be accomplished well in the
digital space while still producing a high-end tradition glossy magazine. You will see the pro.SEOmoz.org
domain analysis at the top of the next page. An attachment document in the appendix is available for much
larger and easier reading.
We are not going to delve to deep right now on the technical factors they are using to come to the scores
and check marks. Focus first on the primary top line domain scores, which are out of a total possible 100.
Modern Dream Homes is well of the mark at 9. This is very poor, but again its not that urdreamhome.ie is
doing many things incorrectly, but because urdreamhome.ie is not really in the game on the Internet yet.
What it comes down to is that no one on the entire internet links to your website and by, no one I really
mean two links from (your local chamber) www.clifdenchamber.ie/ and that is the extent of your inbound
links. Inbound links from other sites was the primary basis for Google PageRank, where more links is

4. better than less, and ‘better links’ from a ‘variety of sites’ are desired over many links for one or two other
sites or many links from a disreputable website often called, ‘link farms.’
Search engine optimization tool SEOmoz.org gives urdreamhome.ie a 1/100 for Page Authority, which is
the bare minimum for having a live page an owned domain and domain authority of 9/100, which basically
means your site is who it says it is and not mismatched content to the home domain.
Here is your primary local competition on keywords of interest in your subject matter vertical. They are an
estate rental site and not really subject matter content competition but return higher that your site on all the
choose 26 keywords except one, “ur dream home’ and the home website is so poorly executed that it comes
in second in the (SERPs) to http://www.facebook.com/urdreamhome, which is the magazines Facebook
page.
What this means is that if a search user knows of your brand name and searches for it he or she will find
your site if they are looking based on the content you write about they do not know you. On the internet
this is bare minimum, the internet is organized by subject matter and interest NOT provider or source of
content, when a user is searching for content based on words associated with your content they will never
find your website based on your current digital strategy and current web design. Currently an estate rental
company is your most competent local keywords competitor. Elegant.ie is not really a content competitor at
all in the conventional sense, it is an estate rental site for tourists, but it is a keyword competitor since it is a
stronger site.
In fact of the 26 search keywords selected (could have chosen more but results would have been the same)
your website did not show up in the first 50 search engine return pages (SERP) (first 5 pages of search
returns) in Google, Bing or Yahoo! .ie version. If your content performs this poorly in the .ie version,
remember that it is performing even more poorly in every other English language search engine version on
the planet. This is tens of thousands of potential readers not enjoying and consuming your content. See all
keywords used that your urdreamhome.ie content should appear with when searched, the addition of a
coherent digital strategy and web design infrastructure would go far to improving this problem.

6. The simple truth is you barely show up in the Internet search. By this I mean your brand does, but not any
of your content you are paying to produce, the subjects of interest you are paying people to write about, nor
are the personalities associated with your publication highlighted and leveraged for readership in a
meaningful way.
However, seomoz.org was hardly the only search optimization tool to show a harsh reality about
urdreamhome.ie current presence on the Internet in the .ie domain or in general. The Chrome browser’s
SEO plug-in made by Sean Banister at MarketingAbuse.com also shows this reality as well and a diversity
of metrics given the unavailability of other metrics for this site on the Internet. Some numbers between the
two tools may vary, but the themes and conclusions we can draw are similar. There is just not enough
searchable content on this site for any search engine to notice it, nor is there any inbound, outbound, or
onsite interactive to be ranked well.

7. Notice the very few number of pages indexed by the search engines this includes none of your bi-monthly
pdf’s of your magazine or the articles inside them. This is bad. This is due to a genuine lack of content on
your site. There is very little linkable content on your site and as I have said before pdf’s are not search
engine friendly unless explicitly made so and none of them are currently even hosted on your domain and
website. Pdf’s are bad enough, not even having them hosted on your site is much worse.
Notice also the lack of registered backlinks in this tool that are registering for your site. There is a
relationship here as pdfs and not traditionally considered search engine friendly. Links to your site from
others is the basis of early search ranking formulas. Your site is not doing the bear minimum for the earliest
ways to rank search to even notice you.
The use of mymagonline.com’s pdf viewer currently in use, must go. It is a relic of 1995 Internet thinking
and it adds no brand value for you on the Internet, as it keeps your best content unavailable to be found by
nearly 99% of potential readers who do not know you exist but may be interested in your content and
subject area.
I am generally against the use of pdfs by digital publishers who are serious about a competent digital
strategy. However, it is still done and if you must go with a form of pdf-based presentation the
implementation of both http://www.scribd.com/ pronounced (Scrib dee or Scribed) and PageSuite
http://www.pagesuite.com/ is far superior from an SEO prospective and every user perspective available.
Both present superior options to leverage your current content into the viewing of more readers with
minimal transition cost. Scribd is an archival social database of pdf’s, which makes the content inside the
pdf’s search engine accessible. Think of it as the ‘Google of pdfs.’ Pdfs loaded into scribd.com are search
engine friendly.

8. PageSuite on the other hand offers a similar ‘e-reader’ feature like the one you currently attempted to
implement on your current site, but offer a wide range of other features to complement it and get your
content read. They also have integrated solutions for publishers interested in doing as little as possible with
their PDF based content but are interested into turning them into viewable apps for online subscription
models through iTunes based iBooks, Android chrome store, and Amazon.com e-readers. But Pagesuites
online pdf e-reader is also not search engine friendly, but works much better than mymagonline.com.
I was also pleasantly surprised to find both a robot.txt (but the page does not work correctly) and a
Simemap.xml available for the search robots, but the search accessible content is completely lacking.
Site-wide Optimisation
Pleasant design and fresh and diverse content is completely lacking on this urdreamhome.ie currently,
when the subject matter of modern homes and design definitely allows for it. For example freshome.com
does this very well.
Notice they topic areas across the navigation bar large photo with new blog post, email and other hot web
standardized features in the upper right of the sidebar. Now contrast this to the current top half homepage
for urdreamhome.ie

9. The ad block is empty as my flash and ad blocker is turned on. The top half of the homepage is not very
desirable from a user perspective nor does it give many interesting options to be transported to ‘my dream
home.’ When I come to this site, I want to get transported to a reality where I can live in a cool modern
home not stare at ‘white space and tiny links. This design in contrast provide little fresh and interesting
content nor is it displayed in a way to make it user friendly and get your content circulated and linked back
to from all over the Internet. Way to much white space is being wasted in the upper left of the page.
Next in site basics is the robot.txt as it claims to exist, but is not a proper real robots.txt it is just a redirect
to the homepage as ‘robot.txt.’ This does not instruct a search bot to do anything for good or bad, but the
pages at least have a <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" call in the header with a <meta
name="revisit-after" content="31 days"/> monthly revisit in the head tags. This is just a much older way to
instruct the robots.txt
It was difficult to assess the pros, cons, and quality of urdreamhome.ie URL structures because it only has
eight pages nine pages if you include the Sitemap.xml. The structure is a start, but since the site is lacking
fresh content the evaluation of this as an element to good SEO is an empty set.
For the internal link structures I can assess this site as having poorly executed internal link architecture as it
has a redundant “Main Menu” and “Quick Link Menu” no vertical menu links in a vertical navigation bar
or indexed in a global footer.
This site has a Sitemap.xml however it is fairly limited in what value it adds given there are only 8 html
pages on the entire site. It is not clear whether this Sitemap.xml would dynamically add entries if new
pages were added. This appears to be a manually created sitemap. However, at least one exists and they are
considered to be a basic element of good site SEO.
There is very little on this website to attract user engagement. Even the ability to signup to get a physical
magazine is cumbersome to non-existent. You can’t even pay to get the physical magazine if you wanted it.
Only submit an email for someone to be in touch. This is not scalable in any fashion. A self-administered
web store to at minimum get the physical print magazine is bare minimum for engagement if your goal is to
sell magazines. Even this is arguably a relic of 1996 web 1.0 think of what this site could or should be.
There is no mention of any social media accounts anywhere on the site, even though this urdreamhome.ie
currently also operations a Facebook page and Twitter account. Threading the needle of social dialog with
anyone remotely interested in this brand of subject matter is nearly impossible your site must encourage
readers to like and follow your brand on facebook and twitter.

10. Urdreamhome.ie does render well on all common PC based web browsers and on the standard mobile
browsers. There is no mobile version, however; this site is so sparse and light the only object of concern
loading is the ill conceived un-standardized ad block built into the top right side of the site’s eight pages.
However, this does bring us to a disjointed user experience as the site renders very different in safari
browsers (OSX, Windows& and IOS4) in comparison to Firefox, Chrome, Explorer and Opera.
Since arguably Mac and iPhone Safari users may be more incline to be interested in ‘contemporary living’
and contemporary design’ adjustments must be made as this could at some point be a core audience and
should be specifically targeted. A bad browsing experience will turn them off from your brand, be Safari
friendly.
There appears to be no effort in monetizing this site, its content or brand, not to mention any really old
content long out of print. There is to little traffic on this website to show up in site quantcast.com,
compete.com, or Google AdPlanner without direct submission by your company, I recommend doing so if
you are interested in connecting with advertisers you do not currently know. It is time to have ads on
urdreamhome.ie.
The advertisement slot for urdreamhome.ie is in a terrible location and only running as a very blockable <ul
id="banner_slideshow"> object made of hard links with zero tracking codes built in to know if the links are
being clicked. In Safari browsers you must scroll over to the right to even see it.
The Ads are not of any web standard size I am aware of and there are zero dynamic residual ad slots, and
zero text ads, therefore urdreamhome.ie is leaving a fair amount of money on the table by not being in any
online advertising networks.
I recommend complying with IAB http://www.iab.net/about_the_iab standards, norms, and practices (IAB
Ireland http://iabireland.ie/) and join an online advertising network AdSense being the easiest or even
Google Display, not the most premium, but something always beats nothing. I could not even locate the
size ratio in the page source code. There is no place on the site to even request to advertise on the site, or
the magazine that navigation assisted. but I found a “request a link” page directly from Google search and
not from anywhere navigable on the site.

11. Example of Urdreamhome.ie ad
Here is an example of what IAB standard ad slots on websites conform to dimensions wise.

12. Here is dwell.com common right sidebar with ads, flash is where the ad goes and right below, 300x250 pix.
Urdreamhome.ie is entirely inaccessible to non-English speakers. I was also surprised to find an ".ie"
without any available Gaeilge language services. Arguably, should be a minimum standard for .ie sites, but
given the language diversity of the European Union and the brought appeal of ‘modern design’ going
beyond language barriers more language options should be available for readers. Implementing Google
Translate is the imperfect but free and bare min option for doing this.

13. Off-site Optimisation and Social media
Social Media execution is very poor for urdreamhome.ie. This is primarily because it appears to have been
slapped together and not been done in the same professional manner as each bi-monthly magazine. Please
refer to all the zeros in each area of ‘Social’ below. We will move into social and offsite optimization
before we talk about on-site SEO tweaks, because more effort has been placed by the company in this area
recently so there is more information to make judgments based upon.
and seomoz.org’s opensiteexplorer.org look at social media and urdreamhome.ie

14. In the course of my exploring and watching urdreamehome.ie, I have been happy to see a twitter account
http://twitter.com/urdreamhome and Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/urdreamhome arise. When
in the course of exploring your present Internet infrastructure for the first few times, I was exploring in
October 2011 these either did not exist or were so poorly executed they were unlocatable in every form of
search I investigating your website used, meaning, they were worthless if they are meant to attract anyone
to have conversations about the subject urdreamhome.ie writes about.
However, currently both accounts are operated via the ‘broadcast’ model and not ‘dialogue’ model of
relationship to readers. Refer to the screen shots below and the long periods of inactivity and not
interactivity with current brand fans and followers. This is mistake many publishers make when
approaching social media, they think of it as merely another channel to broadcast their message or product,
when in fact, these tools value are only realized when use for dialog with the readers on the other side of
the message.
Without creating two way dialogue with readers with these account they are adding little value other than to
exist and deny a competitor or hostile your online name space in the social media services. Secondly it is
impossible to even know your magazine has a twitter or Facebook page from looking at every page on your
website. The needle must be threaded you must encourage site visitors to follow your magazine on twitter
or like it on Facebook. At this point with zero dialogue I see no compelling reason for them to do so.
On twiter.com the tweets are irregular broadcast bursts.

15. Urdreamhome.ie On Facebook.com (that back issues share is not intuitive and requires use of pdf viewer)
Staff writers and magazine personalities are inaccessible in any capacity that has to do with work for the
magazine.
Except for staff writer Michael Rice ‘Bioarchitect,’ who is the only staff member I can actually find with an
active Twitter account, Facebook, and YouTube page. More interestingly he has a few of his articles from
the UR Dream Home Magazine ripped out whole hog on his site searchable text, but he does not even link
to the urdreamhome.ie website once anywhere on the site or in the content.
Does these seem right to you? Other staffers even have links to their personal sites on the urdreamhome.ie
staff page, but none of them link to their employer/ bylines given by Magazines own website.
Generally, when I have seen this in the past it is because they have never been asked if they would or they
are not proud of their employers website. If a brand does not care about their web presence their staff will
care even less how they represent that brand online or in general. Your employees must like and want to

16. interact on your website about their content they produce for you with their readers. They would not write
about modern architecture design and living if they did not.
There are not RSS feeds on the website to subscribe to nor is their any content for the many readers use
RSS to read a diverse selection of content on the web to read and distribute. There are no links on the main
site to the social urdreamhome.ie Facebook and twitter accounts. No email newsletters exist for a user to
sign up for, since email is the granddaddy of online social media urdreamhome.ie needs to begin at least a
weekly or monthly newsletter; as currently there is not even passive attempt to contact information reader
information, only ‘enquiries’ and a lame ‘email a friend,’ but email them what exactly, when there is no
content articles to read or include in a txt only let alone to email a friend.
The implementation of the ‘AddThis’ box is in an awkward spot and again no content is worthy of adding
or sharing because it is either too old or stuck in an unsocial pdf reader. I guarantee if you check the
‘AddThis’ share stats no one uses it. They are meant for article content pages.
Overall, social media interaction off of the primary website is very poor, bare minimum effort, with less
that that as a return in value.
Executing ‘social media’ correctly at the business level is becoming the new SEO as traditional SEO
becomes less important. The recent changes made to search engines (including Google’s Panda project) in
the last 18 months have emphasized the role and interactions between websites, their content, and its
interaction on social media sites and the quality of the content. Because of this, I highly recommend adding
a Google+ page for the magazine. Google has a strong incentive to rank these new pages high (they don’t
want to see Google+ fail) so they are being generous in SEO terms to those who use this new social media
option well. Expect future changes to the search engines to keep moving in the direction of social
interactivity scoring gaining in the scoring methodology over tradition SEO being discussed on the next
page.
On-page Optimisation
Discussing on page Optimisation with the current website is almost pointless, because most of the errors
would be sorted out quickly once a digital strategy and new socially media publishing centric web approach
was taken with an author friendly content management system in place.
Titles tags are currently a net negative SEO issue for this current site as every page of the 17 pages has the
same title “UR Dream Home.” Not only are they not descriptive about the subject matter it says nothing
about the content or subject matter of the site. The large blue “Ur Dream Home” below is the title tags.
Title tags are the most important tags. They need to say much more observe two different examples from
Dwell. This can easily be fixed in a new CMS or with a few manual html coding hours.

17. The ‘metas description’ (darker text starting with http://) are the second most important <head> tag element
and they are a complete mess. Seomoz.org tools shows us that the description is the same as the title which
is a big SEO net negative and “no no,” as the search bot ignores the duplicate text and finds something else
on that specific page to use instead, giving us the above ugly html code and extra URL showing, unfriendly
and not click worth mess above.
The URL of “urdreamhome.ie” structure would be fine if any page that was search discoverable on the
website mentioned, ‘modern living,’ ‘modern homes,’ etc. Since it does not a general reader has no idea
what it means.
The H1 tags are identical the title tags, meta keywords tags, and meta description tags. This is highly un-
SEO friendly and will add negative marks to a sites overall scoring in a search engine rankings. Each tag
needs unique content tailored to getting users to you site I suggest subject area of interest.
Also, I do not ever really think putting company logo images with alt- text (meant for blind users of the
internet) under the H1 heading at any given time, but that is a personal preference from working inside
<head> tags in the past. Some people have tried using this area to ‘goose’ their SEO ‘Google juice’ via
having more words in the <head> tag, but I have not really seen it work out for the long run, the bots
adjusted to the abuses of this ability to stuff more words in the header.
Thankfully, this convention is followed on the site, but it is a minor positive for the negative SEO penalties
having the same text in so many different tags incurs upon your website. All for should be different. I will
skip over some of the lesser important tag configurations because at this point from an SEO perspective
your website is failing to rank.
I have included the on page elements for competitor freshhome.com for comparison of this site not having
the same information in 4 different tags.
Seomoz.org On Page Elements for urdreamhome.ie

18. Seomoz.org On Page Elements for Freshome.com
Seomoz.org Error warnings for urdreamhome.ie (Duplicate content and page titles, and meta descriptions
as described above)

19. Hosting issue found with SEOMozBar
How a site is hosted is not always a consideration for some organizations rushing a website out the door.
However, in the case of being an Irish ‘.ie’ being hosted in the UK can cost you in the .ie versions of
Google, Yahoo, and Bing search. I am aware it may be cheaper to host in the UK or elsewhere, but it does
come at a cost in terms of SEO.
In the header there is a specific geo-location call for the site in its proper location in Ireland. <meta
name="geo.placename" content="Bothair na Minne, Ballybane, Galway, Republic of Ireland"/> A geo tag
is very nice step, but search bots are generally programmed to compare the geo coded tag to the host
location and when they do not match this is a net negative mark from an SEO perspective and search
ranking penalties apply.
The one directory that comes to mind the urdreamhome.ie should get listed on is the design section of
world-newspapers.com/design.html which lists a huge mix of English language design magazines of the
world. Currently “Ur Dream Home” is not listed. There are more directories out there, but this one seems to
have a nice blend of content many sites worldwide listed and has first page search engine returns for many
keywords.
Can we learn anything else from your competitors’ websites that could come in handy when thinking about
digital strategy? Let us take a look at what other subjects of interests those readers have and what other
website they enjoy.

20. What other sites do Freshhome.com readers enjoy and what subject areas?
What other sites do dwell.com readers enjoy and what subject areas?

21. Website Recommendations for a future Urdreamhome.ie
Go big with your goals and fight for a share of the world’s interest in modern living. Why could this not be
done from Ireland? Millions of English speakers worldwide love modern design, architecture and the
furnishings that go with this lifestyle. Become the go to website for your nation on this topic, but go bigger
make my friends all over the world who love apartmenttherapy.com jealous want to come to Ireland, but
don’t take my word for it. (http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/real-estate/georgian-townhouse-in-dublin-
ireland-the-new-york-times-121708-072485) Sell the modern living lifestyle
Quit hiding the good stuff inside pdfs. To get there a full reboot of urdreamhome.ie content strategy is
required before anything else can move forward. Then a digital strategy of how much paid or free content
for the web etc must be decided the status quo is not an option. “How do we make the most money online
and grow readership and brand awareness?” I cannot answer these, they must come from management.
Then build your digital garden and decide what tools you want to use to achieve your desired digital goals.
A defined digital strategy including a good content system and digital marketing will generally take care of
the many major and minor SEO issues your site currently has and H tag here or there being imperfect is not
that important, but this requires fresh great content on nearly a daily basis.
Glossy magazines do give a level of prestige that some web only sites just do not have. Period. Often it has
been argued to me that being in print makes you exist for the older generation of readers for whom the web
is not their primary information vehicle (the over 50 crowd) and I tend to agree. However, the inverse of
this is true, if you are not proactively engaged online your brand does not really carry as much weight to
younger readers. I am one of them.
The content of the ‘Ur Dream Home,’ is excellent. Getting the content part correct is now the hardest part
for many on the web who do everything else on the website building, SEO correctly since there are so
many sites only everything else being equal if the content is bad no one will read or share it. Your content
must be accessible to readers and you must start blogging about the subjects your brand cares about. Good
content is the starting place for digital publishers.
This is good news for urdreamhome.ie, is that freshome.com, dwell, and ‘fresh home & design,’ offer three
models or paths that could be examined in a creating a fresh digital strategy. From the pure digital only
play, through print as ‘best of web,’ and all of the advertising and subscription model options in between.
One alone my not be the right one for you, but a combinations of the elements that other design magazines
are doing may work best for you. I suggest web lead your new strategy and the magazine be a ‘best of web’
product with some exclusives still for print and others just online.
Why go digital at all? Currently urdreamhome.ie is leaving a bunch of money on the table by not having a
comprehensive digital strategy and not even actively promoting the purchase of its glossy magazine online.
This must end and digital needs to add revenue to the bottom line and allow for deeper relationships with
your readers.
Ditch the dinosaur. It is time to build a new web site and to ditch your current web 1.0 1995 era site. I
would recommend going with a Wordpress.com content management system hosted in Ireland. Wordpress
is favored by bloggers and less technically equipped internet authors. Hire and contract out with a real firm,
the neighbors kid brother will not cut it and retain someone for basic website and CMS maintenance and
minor upgrades and changes. No one likes to see information on a site that has not been updated for years
or months. If this is to cost prohibitive I would recommend free use of the photo centric tumblr.com as your
CMS do to its ease and customization features offered to those on the ‘do it yourself’ web operations
budget. Have comments. Comment systems create user communities. I Highly recommend talking with and
using disqus.com as they are free and have a very easy setup to get comments integrated into any website.
This would be a great started. I recommend organizing the content. More specifically by subject area
similar to the way freshhome.com has done since this is how people read and organize content of interest
online. The web is build around subjects of interest not brands or sources. You need more content. Staff

22. should be highly encouraged and paid for new content produced as web only. Fresh in internet terms means
daily new blogs weekend posts are optional, but can be helpful for an emerging site.
I recommend pursuing all new digital streams of revenue via mobile and tablet apps for as many platforms
as you could afford, but start with iOS5 for iPhones and iPads first, Pagesuite would be a good vendor. I
have a feeling those IOS/ Mac users will be most inclined to want to read about modern design given Apple
and Steve Jobs role in integrating modern design into society changing technology products. The Internet is
going mobile and your content should be available for reading there and currently it is no.
I would also recommend the use of scribd.com the search engine friendly pdf archiving and sharing system
and Pagesuite if you want to get maximal readership value of your the pdf versions of your magazine, but
be warned most people on the internet do not prefer reading pdfs online they like interactive web pages.
Blogging must be part of his or her content creation jobs and if it's not, someone needs to be hired to do it.
At this point following internet SEO norms and guidelines to the letter, most shared in this report will ad
much value to a website that has done the above correctly. I highly recommend adding a Google+ page for
the magazine and integrating the use of social media into your daily content cycle. Meaning at least one
link per day for Twitter, Facebook and G+ and interacting with other publishers and writer’s content and
readers in each social eco-system. This would be the minimum effort given to expect any positive feedback
return. Authors and staff should also be encouraged to become content and brand evangelists for your
magazine.
Lastly, I would recommend use of purchased search engine, display ads, text ads, and Facebook social ads
targeting known readers interested topics. This should only be done as the new digital strategy is rolled out
over a new website, that has its content open and accessible for readers to enjoy and interact and share. I
would target readers of the three competitors we mentioned and those apartmenttherapy.com readers from
Ireland so that readers of these sites know that your magazine will show them great design and modern
living not to far away from where they actually live and not just in San Francisco New York or London but
right here in Ireland.