Search Engine Optimization Philippines

When will all these SEO contests end? It’s like they’re popping everywhere like mushrooms. But who am I to blame them? It’s a good way of gaining lots of attention and building backlinks to sponsor’s websites as well.

Guess what’s the new keyword? It’s SULUMITS RETSAMBEW. At first I thought it was some Indian phrase until I realized it was just WEBMASTER STIMULUS in reverse. I told you they’ve got it backwards!

Anyway, good luck to all participants – especially to my friends.

By the way, if you want a sudden boost in SEO, try sponsoring your own contest.

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I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw 4 different sites having the same content rank one after the other on Google for the search phrase “how to send tons of traffic to your adsense site“.  I always thought that Google is strict about stuff like these but it appears that there’s a fluke in their system.  Here’s a screenshot of the search results I saw at the time of this posting.

The URL of these 4 sites are:

1. http://www.netseek.net/articles/7-Powerful-Ways-To-make-Money-From-Adsense-Using-Only-Free-Tools.asp
2. http://websitetips.com/articles/marketing/adsensemoney/
3. http://www.dcvinc.com/adsense/index.html
4. http://www.cyberindian.com/web-marketing/google-adsense/7-powerful-ways-to-make-money-from-adsense.php

Does this mean that Google is only strict about duplicate sites and not merely duplicate content?  Or is it just possible that no other sites rank well for this particular search term that all these 4 sites occupied the first 4 slots of the search results?

Whatever!!!

If you have a website and you wish to have lots of people visit it then you have to eat, drink and breathe SEO. By this I mean, you must always keep search engine optimization in your mind whenever you create new websites and update your existing ones.

You have to think and do search engine optimization everyday until it becomes second nature for you to:

1. Research your keywords
2. Research your competition
3. Write keyword rich content
4. Build links

Yep, do all those on a daily basis and until you find yourself to be thinking of SEO every minute and dreaming of it in the night. Then don’t forget to add some spice to it, otherwise it’ll get boring really fast. For the spice, I mean read other SEO people’s blogs and subscribe and participate in SEO forums.

Lastly, always experiment. Don’t forget to try out new things and keep that creative mind of yours going. If you think if something which you think “might work” then give it a try. If it works, share it with others so they too will share their fresh ideas with you.

Cheers!

This is a sponsored post.

Search engine marketing or SEM is now a common buzz word in any business hoping to do some business via the internet. A wide range of offline industries are now taking advantage of the online marketplace in making both leads and sales and for a good reason. As far as I know, the internet is the cheapest way to advertise and if done properly, it has long term effects on ones business.

A good example is the dental industry. More and more dental practitioners are either paying experts or doing stuff on their own in an attempt to discover the best online marketing strategy for dental practice. Take note that online marketing is not just about getting people to come to your website. It’s also about conversions. In other words, how much in terms of percentage of your online visitors are turning into customers?

As opposed to the typical e-commerce store where visitors can directly purchase product through their computers, internet marketing for dentists can be a bit trickier mainly because a dentist does not offer a product that can be physically delivered. Rather, a dentist offers a service that requires a physical appearance by the customer on the dentist’s clinic.

So, how can internet marketing help a dentist make sales? The solution is not to think in terms of sales but rather in terms of leads. Remember that the key here is conversion and conversion is not necessarily a sale. A conversion can simply be an appointment. With that in mind, a dentist’s website must therefore have a way for people to set an appointment with the dentist.

How can that be done? Well, with a little help from skilled programmers (like myself), creating an online appointment system that can be “plugged in” to a dentist’s existing website can be easily created. With such a system in place, any dentist can now take advantage of the net in boosting their sales.

Need a programmer? Email me at mjglopez AT gmail DOT com.

Click through rates or CTR is often mentioned when talking about Pay-per-click or PPC because better CTR results to lower Cost-per-click or CPC. Now, before you get confused with all those terms, let continue to what this post is all about.

Free search or organic search is said to be the best way to get traffic to your website. All you need to do is optimize your website for your targeted keywords and you get instant free traffic. Furthermore, it is said that the number 1, 2, 3 and 10 spots are the best spots to be on the search engine results mainly because 1, 2 and 3 are the first thing that the searcher sees and number 10 is the last that he sees when he scrolls down.

While that’s mostly true, I also noticed one thing while checking my Google Analytics report for my science blog. I noticed that I’m getting quite some traffic for the search phrase “why is the sea color blue” so I went to Google and did a search for that phrase and this is what I saw.

My website “Mike’s Science and Nature Blog” wasn’t on any of the sweet spots mentioned above. It was ranked as number 5 for the search phrase mentioned and yet I’m getting lots of traffic. If you take a good look at the screenshot above, you’ll probably notice why. Just in case you didn’t notice it (or maybe you don’t have enough time to take a good look at it), here’s why…

* Item no. 1 is about HTML color codes
* Item no. 2 is about why the sky is blue
* Item no. 3 is a Wikipedia entry on the color blue
* Item no. 4 is about a list of stuff on the moon
* Item no. 5 my website, is exactly what the searcher is looking for

The result therefore is that my site gets visited even though if it’s only number 5 in the SERPs. While the first four may still be getting traffic from that search phrase, I believe that my site is probably getting more traffic then them for this particular search phrase.

In other words, I get more click-thrus because my site delivers what the searcher is looking for even though it’s ranked only at number 5. In other words, it’s not just about ranking but also grabbing a person’s attention with your page title and meta description/page content that brings in the wanted traffic. The same can be said if the first 5 websites are all about the same topic but one of them has a more attractive title that grabs the user’s attention.

In the end good copywriting especially in titles still helps a lot in free search traffic as it often equates to good click through rates.

If you’re always in tune with what’s new then you might already know that Squidoo lenses rank well in the search engines, well at least it used to be that way. I’m new to Squidoo and I only have a handful of lenses but honestly, I don’t see any of them ranking well in the SERPs. On the contrary, I see my non-squidoo sites optimized for the same keyword ranking better. Some even getting to number one.

So, what’s wrong with Squidoo? Here’s what I think has happened – Lots of spammers jump into Squidoo and starting filling it with spam. Google might have noticed it and probably decided to reconsider the ranking of Squidoo pages. Apparently, it’s just not me who has observed this. Another article called “Squidoo Rankings Drop” also posted about it and a few others.

I wonder if Squidoo will remain to be of value to search engine ranking.

I’m no Adobe Flash developer but I do love websites that have good Flash interfaces that helps users navigate more easily. Until recently, search engines are known to ignore Flash animation which is the reason why SEOs always recommend using plain text and ordinary html links to make a site more rank well in the search engines. That however will soon be among the “old ways”.

Google Engineer Matt Cutts announce on his blog that Google and Adobe are working to make Flash more search engine friendly. Add to that, Google has just rolled out new code to allow its spiders to index Flash animations on websites. Here’s the post from Matt:

Google gets better at Flash with Adobe’s help

That said, I guess that the demand for Flash developers will skyrocket in the coming days, months and years and we will probably see more and more websites running purely Flash. This definitely pushes the interactivity of the internet a step higher.

Ok, so you wanna optimize your website for the search engines huh? Well, I hope to teach you how to do that so you might as well bookmark this site and subscribe to my RSS feed to make sure that you get the latest of my updates.

Search engine optimization or SEO for short is not rocket science. Anyone with the right knowledge can do it. You don’t have to attend workshops to learn SEo though that would definitely help. In my case, I learned SEO the same way I learned riding the bike – by trial and error. Back then, everybody was talking as if ranking in the search engines has some secret formula that only a few know about. The truth was the search engines themselves are telling the world how to do it. There was no secret. Just plain easy to understand facts.

Okay, enough of the babbling. I know you want to learn SEO so let’s get you started.

Step 1. Keyword Research

Identifying your keyword is the first crucial step in search engine optimization. It is the process by which you do some research to know what your target audience are typing in the search engines. In other words, you need to know what your visitors will be searching for. Without knowing what they type, you have very little chance of getting visitors that really want what you have.

First, you need to identify your primary keyword. If your website is about baby toys then your primary keyword is “baby toys”. After identifying what your primary keyword is, you now need to find out what the world is searching for with regards to baby toys. But how do you do that?

Easy, there’s this website called Keyword Discovery where you can punch in your primary keyword and it will give you a list of the top 100 keywords searched recently. They do have a paid service that will return as many as 10,000 related keywords but for now, all you need to learn is just the free version.

Keyword Discovery Keyword Research Tool

Keyword Discovery Results

After you’ve got your list from KD, what you want to do next is select which keywords you want to focus on and find out how tough the competition is for each of these keywords. To do this, you need to go to Google.com and do a search for your selected keyword. For this tutorial, we will use the keyphrase “baby boy toys”.

Below is a sample search result for our targeted keyword. I want you to look at its title which in this case is Baby Boys Apparel – Babies”R”Us. Note that our targeted keyword is not in it which means that we may have a chance of defeating this particular website for this keyword.

Sample Search Result for “baby boy toys”

Next thing I want you to look at is the number of competing websites for this keyword. You can see by looking near the top right corner of the search results page.

Number of Competing Websites for “baby boy toys”

The above screenshot shows that there are 4.97 million websites competing for this keyword. Now that’s too many. What you want is a keyword that has less than 100,000 competitors unless most of the of the top 20 results don’t have your keyword on their title. But for the sake of giving you an example, let’s just go ahead with “baby boy toys”.

Step 2. On-page Optimization

After deciding on which keyword to focus on, your next step is to optimize your landing page. A landing page is any page on your website where you will deliver what searchers are looking for. It can be your homepage or some other page where you will either sell a product, a service or just post an article. The landing page is what you will focus on.

On-page optimization is just a matter of putting your keywords in the right spots on your landing page. This spots are the following:

1. The Title Tag
2. The Meta Keywords Tag
3. The Meta Description Tag
4. The Header Tags (H1, H2, H3)
5. The first paragraph of your text
6. The mid-section of your text
7. The last paragraph of your text
8. The alt attribute in images
9. The footer of your page

I won’t explain these in detail but what you would like in general is to place your keywords in all these places. Example, in your title tag you might want to put “Safe Baby Boy Toys” or just “Baby Boy Toys”. In your meta keywords, you will have to put your targeted keyword and other keywords that you think are related to your product, service or topic. Your meta description has to be a short sentence or two describing what your website is about mentioning your targeted keyword once in it.

With this, the first part of your landing page’s HTML code should look something like this:

<title>Safe Baby Boy Toys</title>

<meta name=”Description” content=”CoolToys, Inc. sells baby boy toys that are safe to play with. Feel free to browse our catalog for the perfect toy for your baby boy.” />

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”baby boy toys, baby toys, boys toys, safe baby toys, toys for baby boys” />

You can add as many keywords as you like in the meta keywords tag but not too much. 10 to 15 related keywords should be fine. Next thing to work on are you header tags. Be sure to put your keyword in the H1 tag as well as in some of your H2 and H3 tags. Note that H1 has to be used only once and locate it near the opening <body> tag but you can use H2 and H3 as often as you need.

Lastly, include your keywords in the actual text of your webpage. Use it properly and naturally. Don’t stuff your text with your keywords as it is considered spam by search engines. You just want to mention it once in the first paragraph, once in the last paragraph and a few times in the middle of the text.

If you have images in the body of your text, it would also be nice if you put your keywords in the alt attributes of some of them. Here’s a sample image tag with your keyword in the alt attribute:

<img alt=”Baby boy toys by CoolToys, Inc.” src=”babyboytoys.jpg” border=”0″ height=”100″ width=”150″ />

As for the footer, you can include your keyword in the copyright notice. An example would be:

Copyright © 2008 CoolToys, Inc – Cool Baby Toys

Now that we’ve got that covered, we can begin our next and final step.

Step 3. Link Building

Link building, also known as off-page optimization is simple to understand but hard to implement. In this step, all you need to do is get as many related websites link back to your landing page. These are called backlinks. Sounds easy right? Yes, it does sound easy until you actually do it. So how do you do it? Here are a few ideas.

• Write a few articles and submit them to article directories such as EzineArticles.com. Don’t forget to include your link in the author’s bio.
• Submit to internet directories. Here’s a list of 4000+ internet directories that you can submit to.
• Participate in forums related to your site. Note that you should never spam the forums with useless posts.

Then there are faster ways but you have to pay for them. They are relatively cheap considering the quality links you’ll get from them in a short span of time. A couple I would recommend are.

• Text Link Ads
• TNX.net

It is worth noting that it is best not to rush in building backlinks. Take your time. If you plan to submit to directories, 10 to 15 a day would do fine. For articles, 1 to 3 articles a week should work.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization can be done by anyone. It doesn’t take a genius to do it. Just stick to the basics and you’ll soon see your site ranking for keywords that you’ve targeted. I hope to have helped you understand what SEO is all about and I wish you the best in your future search engine optimization projects.

Do Superfast Keyword Research with Nichebot – click to get started

I never thought that a contest such as the on-going Busby SEO Challenge can change my life, my SEO life that is. One can really never tell when some fluke in current events will touch their way of living or cause them to choose a different path. Well, I didn’t really experience much of a change but still change is change.

Here’s a short list of my life’s transformation due to the Busby SEO Challenge.

1. I actually participated in a contest. I’m not the contest type of guy but Busby somehow woke up the child in me.
2. I’m thinking more on SEO strategies
3. I’m updating my blog(s) more often
4. I’m back and alive in the SEO forums again
5. I’m dreaming of SEO

Geez! I really never knew how this Busby SEO Challenge could change me!

How do you build links for better ranking in the search engines? Link building is said to be the holy grail of SEO. In fact, it works so well that sometimes you can get a good ranking for a particular search term even if you don’t do on-page optimization. To help you know the best way to build links, I’ve listed 3 rules that you should follow:

1. Don’t do 2-way Link Exchanges

It used to work but now, search engines are getting smarter that they no longer give high value to 2-way link exchanges. In case you don’t know what a two-way link exchange is, it is where you link to another website that in turn also links to you.

2. Don’t put your links on Link Farms

Link farms are places where just about everybody can submit a link to their website without fear of getting rejected by the admin. In fact I believe that most (if not all) link farms are not moderated at all thereby allowing spammers to fill it with links to their websites. Search engines have learned to avoid these types of website so don’t submit to them. Aside from the fact that you’re wasting your time, you might even get penalized.

You can submit to link directories though.

3. Get only one-way or three-way links

The best links are those that are one-way links to your website. To get these, you either have to pay for it or have some really good link bait that people will naturally link to you. A link bait is anything that will make people more interested about your site. Getting one-way links is tough but there’s an easier way. It’s called 3-way linking. The idea here is that you (Site A) links to Site B who then links to Site C who then links to you. It can be cumbersome but it seems to be working. You can check more about 3-way linking here.

That’s how you build links for better search engine ranking.