In Search of Optimization

Hey to all, just wanna share this Youtube video of SEO Rapper Chuck Lewiws performing “Code Design” at Unleashed. Looks cool, sounds cool.

Nice rap there Chuck! ANd oh, I use Firefox too and I pity those who doesn’t.

I’ve heard about Twitter for quite some time but it is only now that I decided to sign up for an account. After getting into the twitter stream, I realized that I should have joined it way back on the first day I heard about it but how could you blame me if all these social networking site invitations are starting to get to my nerves?

Well, what’s done is done and yet again, I should have joined twitter way back.

Ok, so back to the topic. How can twitter be used for search engine optimization? Think link baits. Twitter is not really an SEO tool as you won’t really get much out of it in SEO terms such as links and site optimization but if you use it properly and responsibly, people will start to follow you on twitter wanting to know what’s latest about you. In due time, you’ll start to see people reading your blog and might just link to some of your posts. Now that’s good for SEO isn’t it?

Now that I’ve told you my secret, would you still follow me on twitter? Well it’s really upto you. That’s the beauty of twitter. Aaron Wall calls it the exact opposite of email spam. You can follow who you want to follow and get rid of those whom you don’t want. Now that’s power and that’s why I said you have to use Twitter responsibly.

If you’re not twitter yet then you must join. You can find my Twitter page at http://twitter.com/mikelopez. You can sign-up there as well.

Search engine optimization can be a daunting task for many people and can be second nature to some. After all, SEO is not an exact science especially when search engines change their algorithms. Even the experts can be baffled by what big G and the rest are doing with the SERPs.

Nonetheless, SEO can still be made simple. With a dash of good will and a teaspoon of honesty, you can probably get that sweet spot you’ve been longing for in the search engine results pages. One good example is A Simple Life who after seeing one of my blog posts about an honest request for a link exchange also asked me if it would be possible to exchange links with him.

Well, I didn’t give him exactly what he wanted. Instead of a link exchange, I suggested some content exchange. I did this because I believe search engines give more value to links that are found in articles instead of those in the sidebar. You can read our communication here.

So there you go. Another good exchange of links with a fellow webmaster.

Related:
» The Better Link Building Strategy
» Get 3 Way Links Fast

Link building is one of the most important factors in search engine optimization. Every learned SEO will tell you that getting other websites to link to your site is among the best ways to get good ranking in the SERPs. In fact, there are those who believe that you can rank number 1 on Google even without optimizing your own website if you get enough inbound links.

With this knowledge in hand, the era of link exchange began. Webmasters started to communicate with each other and exchanged links. This is popularly known as two-way links. Others started their own “link exchange” websites wherein members can easily exchange links with other members. For a time, it was good. Those who jumped into the link exchange bandwagon started to see their websites go higher and higher in the SERPs.

But then Google noticed the anomaly and started to make changes and eventually other search engines followed. While I believe that two-way link exchanges still work, they’re no longer given much value by the search engines today. The brilliant programmers in the search engine world started to write algorithms that detect two-way link exchanges.

So what needs to be done? Simple, get one way links instead because Google sees one way links as natural links and give them high value. Problem is, getting a one way link in a “what’s in it for me” world is hard. But what if we can convince the search engines that the links we have are actually one way links and not just link exchanges?

Enter the world of three-way link exchanges. The idea behind this strategy is that 3 websites link to each other in a rotational manner. Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links to Site A. Guess what? It actually works! Many webmasters started to see their websites going up in the SERPs again. Once more, the webmasters have beaten Google - perhaps for a while but it’s enough to bring in enough traffic which often translates to online sales to reward them for their efforts.

» Click here to Get 3 Way Links Fast

Getting three way links is easier than it sounds. The only difference now is that instead of finding one link partner, you just have to look for two. As soon as you have started your band of 3 link exchangers, all you have to do is put the proper links on each other’s sites then you’re set.

That approach however is fine if you only have 1 to 2 websites. If you have lots of websites to get links for, then doing 3-way link exchanges might be troublesome and time consuming. A quick and painless solution is be a part of 3-way link exchange service such as 3WayLinks that will do all the hard work for you. With services like this, all you have to do is a few typing and a few clicks. The system does the work for you.

Well there you go. 2-way link exchanges are pretty much extinct. Go 3-way!

Seldom do webmasters honestly ask for a link exchange nowadays and yet I got a comment in one of my blog posts asking for one. I do receive link exchange requests from friends via instant messaging but this is the first time that I’ve receive one such request via a comment and seeing the honesty in it, I had to oblige.

I contacted the person who posted the comment via email. Her name is Michelle Montianto and she has a blog called “Did You Know?” which as I see it is a mix and match blog tackling different topics. Because of this, I had to ask her exactly what her blog’s topic was to which she replied by email:

My site is a BLOG. I post everything that comes from my mind. I Cannot tell you what exactly the topic of my site. If you like to link me into your website, I’d be so happy sir.

Well, OK. That made me think where among my blogs should I put her link and I thought I’d post it here - in my SEO blog for the following reasons:

1. Her request is an SEO request
2. Her request shows that an honest request for a link exchange is still effective.
3. Her particular comment uses one notable SEO tactic used in posting comments. She used her blog’s name as her name effectively making the link to her blog contain “Did You Know?” as the anchor text

So what can we learn from here? Manually requesting for a link exchange still works. It’s hard work but you might just get that quality back link you’ve been looking for.

Many SEO’s believe that YouTube is a good way to get indirect and direct traffic to their websites and they have believed correctly for YouTube is one good viral tool but things just got better!

YouTube now features a Statistics & Info tab just below the video which lists 3 things:

1. Recent Ratings
2. Honors
3. Inbound Links

It’s number 3 that we’re interested in. If you’re into YouTube viral traffic, then all you have to do is check the stats of your competitor’s video and find out who’s linking to his videos and try to get links from them as well. Even better, when you upload a video to YouTube, you might as well look for similar videos that are popular and see who links to these popular videos and try to get links from these sites too.

The best part of this tool however is that it doesn’t list all sites linking to the video but only a few - which are most probably the ones that bring in most of the traffic.  What you want basically is to find which videos are popular in terms of clicks.

So there ya go. Cheers!

After more than two months of suffering a PR1 from my previous PR5, MikeLopez.info now goes up to PR4.  It’s still one PR less than my original PR5 but at least it’s at lot better than just a PR1.  I’m not sure what caused the PR drop or today’s PR rise - all I can say is that I’m happy.

But I do have a hypothesis…

More than a month ago, I checked with Google webmaster tools and found that I’m having lots and lots and lots of 404s on my site.  Funny thing is that the URLs that are showing as 404s in Google webmaster tools are spam URLs. My first thought was that Big G was penalizing me for not maintaining my site properly.  Another hypothesis offered by Benj was that my site was being linked via a proxy server and thus effectively creating duplicate content.  I checked Google if I was suffering from the proxy black hat technique and was happy to know that I was not.

So, what did I do?  I came into conclusion that the PR drop was caused by the 404s so I decided to do a 404 robots.txt solution for it.  After waiting for some time, the 3000+ 404 errors reported by Google webmaster tools dropped to 500+ and I expect it to fall down to zero.  Now, my PR is rising again and I hope it stays the same.

What about you?  Have you suffered from these sudden PR drops?

I was somehow surprised at how much page not found (404) errors the Google Webmasters Tools found on mikelopez.info that it made me think that it is the reason behind my recent PR drop. About two weeks ago, Google only reported 600+ page not founds but when I checked today, it showed 3000+ 404 errors! Google’s got to be crawling these URLs from somewhere and it’s definitely not from my site.

A sample of the URL is:

http://mikelopez.info/Acer_Travelmate_4502.cfm?…

Here’s a link to the complete CSV file that Google produced showing all the 404 errors. A common pattern I noticed is that it’s all using .cfm (Coldfusion) extensions so I decided to just block such URLs from being crawled in robots.txt. So my robots.txt now looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.cfm

Now, I’ll just wait and see what happens next.

Quick update: I also noticed the same problem for both science.mikelopez.info and religion.mikelopez.info.  Both have 600+ 404s of the same kind.

Anybody else having problems similar to this?

I guess it’s about time for me to write my own account of the recent Search Engine Marketing Conference (SEMCon) 2007 held at Hotel Intercon here in Makati, Philippines. Before anything else, would like to thank Mr. Tracy Childers whom I also call Master Jedi for sponsoring me. Master Jedi, I owe you!

So what happened?

Well oh well, I came on time with Benj Arriola who is also one of the speakers (and his part was really great) though a lot more came way earlier. However, I was still able to hear Mr. Aaron Wall make his keynote speech only to be quite disappointed at how short and general his talk was. I was honestly expecting him to share some new knowledge on how to do things right when it comes to search engine marketing but all he basically did was tell us stuff that can already be read either in his book or on his blog. Anyway, life goes on…

On the other hand, I did learn quite a bit from a few of the many speakers namely:

• Benj Arriola - SEO for Megasites
• Jayvee Fernandez - Effective Web Copywriting
• Elymar Apao - Link Building Tactics, Tools & Techniques
• Rhiz Sanchez - Advanced Link Building Strategies
• Hans Koch - Pitfalls of Pay-per-Click
• Marc Macalua - Innovative Landing Page Optimization
• Abe Olandres - How to Manage your Online Reputation

The other speakers also did pretty well too.  The ones listed above are those with whom I really learned at least one thing that I didn’t know yet.   Too bad I wasn’t able to hear much on Michael Turner and Todd Malicoat’s topics as I was invited by Aileen Apolo to join a meeting (among others) with Derek Callow, Google’s Regional Marketing Director for South East Asia.  We discussed mainly how to push Google’s services in the country and all I can say is that it went great.  Perhaps, it would be safe to say that SEO and SEM will soon be a common service for local establishments to acquire.

What about the food?  It was great but even greater were the chit-chat I had with whoever’s on the table with me.

What did I learn?  A lot but here’s a tip for you guys.  The best lessons are taught not when the speakers speak on stage but when they speak to you personally.  In my case, I found possibly better ways to get backlinks from authority sites, get a position in digg, effective PPC and more.

Who did I meet?  Aside from the usual, I was able to meet gUrLaLiEn, fire_lady and pektho - people I know from the SEO Philippines Forum.

At the end of the conference, I went out to dinner with old friends Jason, Abel, Zaldy, and Jenny.  After dinner, Benj and Hans joined us over coffee and had a nice night discussing stuff like “how to get banned from adsense” and other hilarious experiences.  Geez, I thought I had the worst adsense experience until Hans gave his account of his own adsense tragedy.

All in all, I would say that the conference was worth the Php8,500 though I think it would be better if they made it cheaper.  Looking forward to a second conference soon - perhaps this time with Greg Boser.

Did I hear you say photos???  Well I didn’t take any but others did - namely Rhiz, Jenny, Benj and Jason so might as well check out their blogs.  Cheers!

I won’t call myself an SEO expert nor would I accept to be labeled as a newbie so I guess calling me fairly knowledgeable SEO would be good enough.  Anyway, SEO Lab Unlimited is not a company but simply a blog in blogger that I started.

What’s in it for me?  Simple - it’s my Search Engine Optimization Lab where I can test my ideas and see if they work.  At least with that my precious sites won’t be penalized if I do something wrong - and perhaps do a little money along the way…

Check it out for yourself - SEO Lab Unlimited.