Search Engine Optimization Philippines

A few people are starting to ask me how could they get their websites show up in the search engine results pages (SERP) for keywords of their choices. Because of that, I decided to write this short and basic SEO checklist. Note that this article is aimed to those who are starting to delve into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so if you think that you’re already good enough, then you can either choose to read on or just browse the other articles on this website.

Let’s get started.

Our basic SEO checklist will be composed of the following:

1. Choosing the right keywords
2. Proper keyword placement in your website
3. Getting inbound links

I. Choosing the right keywords

Choosing the right keywords to target for your search engine optimization campaign is considered by most people as the most important part in SEO. Choose the wrong keywords and you’ll get wrong visitors and you will end up wasting time, web space, and bandwidth because your site visitors will not really be interested with what you’re trying to pitch to them.

So how do you choose the right keywords?

First, choose a generic keyword. In our example, let’s use “motorcycle”. Targetting for this keyword will be pretty tough so what we’ll do is check what keyphrases related to “motorcycle” are being searched by people worldwide. How to do that? Good thing we have Overture’s inventory tool. Just go to http://inventory.overture.com/ and enter your basic keyword, in our case “motorcycle.”

Overture will then come up with a list of search phrases made by people for the past month. The first column in the list shows the number of times the search phrase was searched and the second column is the actual search phrase. Most people would go for those that were searched most. But that’s not always the case as you would see. For now, I suggest copying the list and pasting it in Microsoft Excel or Openoffice Calc.

Now we go to Google.com and search for the keyphrases listed by Overture. This time, we check for competition. I chose ‘honda motorcycles’ from the list generated by Overture and searched it in Google. What we’re really interested here is the section that says “Results 1-10 of about xx,xxx,xxx where xx,xxx,xxx is the number of websites found by Google for ‘honda motorcycles’. This is the number of websites we have to compete against. The smaller the competition the better. This is where you weigh the number of searches made as listed by Overture against the number of competitors as listed by Google. What you would usually want is a good amount of searches made and a smaller number of competitors.

What you do now is go back to Excel or Calc and put the number of competitors on a third column. This will make it easier for you to compare.

But that’s just one factor.

Next thing to check for in Google are the titles of the webpages on the Top 10. An optimized page will have the search phrase in their titles. The title of each webpage is that Large Blue Underlined text shown by Google for each website found. If you find that one of the top 10 doesn’t list the search phrase in the title, then it might be worth competing for the keyword. Note that the title of each webpage is not everything. There are other things to consider such as H1/H2/H3 tags, paragraph text, and others but for now, checking the title will do.

Now go back to your Excel or Calc list again and put how many among the top 10 search results have the search phrase in their title.

Repeat the Overture/Google routine for each search phrase that fits your website. I recommend only doing 2 to 4 search phrases as doing too many may burn you out.

After you have chosen the right keywords for your website, it’s now time to move on to the next step.

II. Proper keyword placement in your website

There are a few places in your website that search engines will consider in deciding whether your website should be in top 10 or at the bottom of their millions of pages of list.

The Title Tag

In your webpage’s HTML code, look for the <title></title> tag. You will find this near the top of your webpage’s HTML code. Your keyphrase should be in it. So if I want ‘honda motorcycle’, then my title tag would look as follows:

<title>Honda Motorcycles</title>

If you’re targetting a particular geographical area only, then putting the name of your target area in the title tag is also a good idea. Say, if I want to target only those living in Los Angeles then my title tag would instead look like this:

<title>Honda Motorcycles in Los Angeles</title>

Note that my keyphrase precedes Los Angeles. This will make search engines that my main keyphrase is Honda Motorcycles.

The Header Tags

You should use header tags to properly organize the content of your website. The header tags that are of most importance in SEO are the <H1></H1>, <H2></H2>, <H3> and </H3> tags. Your keywords should also be in them. Note that you should them properly in the content (body) section of your website. Here’s a good example of how to use it.

<h1>Honda Motorcycles</h1>

<p>some text goes here</p>

<h2>Choosing the right Honda Motorcycles</h2>

<p>some text goes here</p>

<h3>Honda Motorcycle Models</h3>

<p>some text goes here</p>

<h2>Proper care of Honda Motorcycles</h2>

<p>some text goes here</p>

<h3>How to clean a Honda Motorcycle’s Engine</h3>

<p>some text goes here</p>

Note the sequence of the h1, h2, and h3 tags. H1 tags should be used only once and it should contain the general topic of the page. Most of the time, this is the same as your page’s title tag. Then h2 tags should be used to name subsections and h3 tags for even more detailed subsections.

Be aware that I’m not teaching HTML here, I’m just pointing out certain sections that are of importance to SEO. If you’re not comfortable with HTML, I suggest that you let your web developer do this for you.

The paragraph text

Search engines are hungry for text. It is your website’s text that they are mostly interested in. Search engines usually choke when you feed them graphics and flash animations and the like simply beacuse they can’t read them. They read only text. So if you’re serious with your SEO campaign, then I suggest that you start putting more text in your website and make the search engines happy.

It is advisable to put your main keyphrases on each sections first paragraph’s first sentence as much as possible. Making mention of your keyphrases at least once or twice in each paragraph is also advisable. There is no clear formula for this so it’s upto you to experiment. There is one important rule though – NEVER OVERSTUFF YOUR WEBSITE WITH YOUR KEYPHRASES. This is called keyword spamming and search engines don’t like it. Children like to eat candies but giving them lots and lots of candies will most likely result to them hating the candies. One technique advised by the experts is to write as naturally as possible, inserting your keyphrases only where they should be. Think of the people visiting your website first, search engines second.

Image ALT attributes

If you have images on your webpage, then it is best to make use of the <img> tag’s ALT attribute. ALT stands for alternate and in the olden days when older browsers still exist, the ALT attribute is used to inform the person viewing the webpage of what the picture is about. Since search engines can’t understand pictures, they will check for the ALT attribute instead.

Here’s how your <img> tags should look like:

<img xsrc=”pic0001.jpg” mce_src=”pic0001.jpg” alt=”Picture of a Red XRM Honda Motorcycle” />

It is also suggested to let your image’s filenames contain your keyphrases as well. So instead of pic0001.jpg, you can rename your picture to red-xrm-honda-motorycle.jpg instead. In this case, your <img> tag should look like this.

<img xsrc=”red-xrm-honda-motorycle.jpg” mce_src=”red-xrm-honda-motorycle.jpg” alt=”Picture of a Red XRM Honda Motorcycle” />

The very end of your website

One last place to place your keyphrase in is in your webpage’s footer section. You can include it in your copyright notice like this:

Copyright © 2006 www.yourwebsite.com – Honda Motorcycles Los Angeles

III. Getting inbound links

This is the last thing to do in your checklist. It is also very important. If you don’t do this, then chances are your website will not be listed by the search engines and end up not being found by the millions of people using the internet.

The internet idea

The internet is based on the idea of websites interlinking with each other. It is how it began. One website links to another and another and so on. Then the idea of search engines came up to help people search the internet find what they want.

How search engines work

Search engines work by sending out little nifty programs that are called robots or spiders. Google’s spider is called GoogleBot and it scours the internet for new and updated websites 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. GoogleBot does this by simply following links from one website to another – much like how a spider moves from one plant to another by following its webs. That’s also why the internet is called the World Wide Web.

These robots or spiders then store the information they collected in the search engine’s database so people can search them.

Now you see, why getting links is important. Though all search engines provide an ‘Add URL’ section where you can simply submit your website and hope to be included into their database, experts advise that we use the more natural way of getting indexed (or spidered) and that is by getting other websites link to our website.

How to get IBL’s

There are a bunch of ways to get incoming links. Here a few:

1. Formally write an email to the webmaster of another website and politely ask him to exchange links with you. By exchanging links, I mean he will link to your website and you will link back to his website. It is best that you exchange links with websites that are related to your website.
2. Submit your websites to directories. Their are hundreds of online directories in the internet and submitting your websites to all of them is a good idea. Better yet, most of them will not require you to link back to them.
3. Participate in online forums related to your website’s topic and reply to other people’s queries. Most forums will allow you to include a signature in your profile. This is where you put a link to your website. Note though that you are dealing with people here so don’t make them hate you. Be kind to them and be professional.
4. Write articles that are related to your website’s topic and submit them to article directories. People most often get articles from these article directories and put them in their own website. The technique here is to include your website’s URL in your article wherever it naturally fits. You can also include your website’s URL in the author profile at the end of your article. An added bonus to this technique is that you get the possibility of being considered as an expert in your field.
5. Write good content. Yes, put good content in your website and you will find people referring your website to others. The people who see your website as a good resource the more chances of them linking back to you simply because they wanted your website.

There are a few more ways to get IBL’s but the items I have listed above will most likely provide more than what you need. It is also worth noting that the more incoming links you have, the higher the probability that search engines will put you in the top 10. This is because search engines consider the number of websites linking to you in computing how important your website is.

In Conclusion

Search engine optimization is more of an art than a series of formula for us to follow. Furthermore, search engine algorithm (programming) changes regularly. SEO is an ever changing art and there is no one formula for all to follow. On the other hand, this Basic SEO Checklist that I outlined here is most likely to stay correct for quite some time basically because it’s basic.

This article is written by Mike Lopez. Mike Lopez maintains a web hosting business and maintains an SEO blog at http://seo.mikelopez.info/. Replication of this article is allowed provided that this footer is included and this entire article is not modified.

Follow me on Twitter