Internet Marketing in Ireland

Internet marketing while including SEO covers a wider area of site promotion, ranging from organising e-mail shots to managing PPC campaigns.

Not long ago there were maybe a handful of companies involved in the internet marketing sector in Ireland, today in 2008 it's hard to find a web agency that hasn't added internet marketing/SEO to their list of services.
Knowing how most of them viewed this sector in the past I remain sceptical of this recent conversion, suspect client pressure and potential revenue loss are the main reasons behind it, and would be very wary of signing up to any non specialised internet marketing or SEO service.

In Ireland internet marketing usually meant PPC, and though these days clients may be much more "Google aware" it still mostly does, and I'd put the reasons for this down to:

Cost: the costs involved in changing an established site so it "performs" in the organic results can seem prohibitive.
Image: many companies are still too fond of mission statements and "impressive" sites and are reluctant to stray too far from their brochureware.
Ignorance: mostly of the search engines and their "quality" criteria, but also an appreciation of what most searchers are looking for, detailed information.

So if you're looking for an internet marketing service in Ireland where should you start?

Well here's an alphabetical list of the people who've got a track record in the sector here in Ireland, there's very little data on the Irish market so if you're targeting it specifically their experience may well be valuable.

There's also a number of "hybrid" webdev/SEM companies that may be worth checking out, among them:

The ones with asterisks I've come across participating in the various SEM/SEO related forums, which in my opinion is always a positive sign.