Search Engine Optimization Philippines

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.

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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.

Blogging has become a favorite past-time for many people and it has also become a favorite money-making habit. Most blogs that you’ll see will either have ads from Google Adsense, Adbrite, Bidvertiser or some other pay-per-click engine while others sell affiliate products. Others blog just for fun while others blog for business.

But no matter what you’re blogging about or what your reason for blogging is, chances are you want the world to know about your blog and the most common way for them finding your blog is via the search engines. That said, you need to blog with the search engines in mind if you want to increase blog traffic. Would that be hard? No. It’s actually pretty easy.

Step 1. Go to Keyword Discovery and type a word or two describing the topic you’re about to right about. In this case, I typed in “blog traffic”. Keyword Discovery returned me a list of search phrases that people searched. The higher the number the more the keyphrase is searched by people.

Step 2. Choose a keyphrase from the generated list and do a search for that keyphrase in Google. If the top 10 have the search phrase in their titles then skip that. We want an easy one. Keep on choosing a keyphrase until you find an “easy” keyphrase. By that, I mean a keyphrase that is not in the title of most of the pages returned. In this case, my easy keyphrase is “increasing blog traffic”.

Step 3. As soon as you find your easy keyphrase, start blogging with that keyphrase in mind. Include the keyphrase in the title of your post and include it naturally in the body of your post.

Optional Step 4. Those three steps are likely to give you good traffic but if you want to be sure then the last step is to build links to your new post. This can be done in many ways but my favorite is to simply ask a fellow blogger to link to your particular blog post in return of the favor of doing the same.

There you go. Increasing blog traffic is not really that hard.

What’s your current placement in the search engine? Is your optimization enough? People seem to worry much about their search engine ranking that some are somewhat hypnotized by it, checking Google everyday just to see how well they are ranking for their keywords. Well, I do understand them, especially those who make money through their websites.

That said, there are those who optimize just for the sake of it and I can’t help but laugh at those who keep on checking their placement in the search engine hoping that they did their optimization right. It’s as if their lives would stop to a screeching halt if their rankings drop. They worry too much.

Yes, I know lots of you reading this will hate me for saying this but search engine placement optimization is not everything. If you really want sustained traffic then know and remember that you won’t get it from the search engines because search engines change their algorithm all the time. My tip to you dear reader is make sure that your website captures your reader attention and make them want to come back. You’ll get a few bursts of traffic from the SERPS but that’s just it. If you don’t get a hold of your visitors then chances are they won’t be visiting your website again.

So please, before worrying about your search engine placement and doing lots and lots of search engine optimization which is almost totally synonymous to “hard work”, make sure that you have a website worth coming to. Otherwise, all those sweat you’ve poured optimizing your site for the search engines in hopes of a good placement will be nothing but waste.

It is common SEO knowledge that getting as many inbound links as possible to your website is one of the most needed steps in ranking well in the search engines. The main reason behind this is that search engines think that you have a trusted website if you have quite a number of websites linking to you.

The problem however that is facing many webmasters is the daunting task of creating high quality content to attract other websites to link to you. While this is the most natural way, it is not the fastest nor is it the easiest. Another method which is easier is to request for a link exchange with another website. It used to work before but search engines learn fast and started to disregard link exchanges. The best way still is to get a one way link to your website. But how?

You can go the hard way or you can go the fast and easy way. The fast and easy way is to pay webmasters for some link love. I do know that this is frowned upon by Google but how would big G know? Thus far, there’s no way for the search engines to know if a link is paid or not and I think they won’t be able to do so anytime soon.

But how much should you pay for a link? Here’s where the good part starts. There are many link brokers in the net but nothing goes better and cheaper than TNX.net. As far as I know, they’re the fastest and cheapest way to get other websites linking to you. Through them, you can select from a wide variety of websites and choose to either get thousands of links from low PR websites or a few quality links from high PR websites.

You can also geo-target your links which is good for SEO. The best part however is that they allow you to provide multiple keywords and keyphrases for a single campaign ensuring that your incoming links will have a wide variety of different anchor texts – another plus for SEO. One more thing, your links won’t be just links but sentences with links in them making them look more natural. All in all, you have full control.

So far, they’re the best link broker I’ve seen. Check them out now.

P.S. You can also sell links through them.

Now that Google announced improvements to Google Custom Search, I’m sure that there are those who are thinking that it might be able to use this new tool as a backdoor to improve search engine rankings but I’m sorry to tell you that it won’t, at least according to Matt Cutts.

It however has some new stuff that will make its users happy.

1. It now powers Adsense for Search making it more useful
2. It now incorporates the sitemaps you submitted to improve site search. This means that new pages on your sites will now be indexed faster if you update your sitemap.

As for improving SE ranking, I’m sure people will find ways to exploit these improvements. It’s just a matter of time before they find something that will either improve ranking or make more money out of it.

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.