Search Engine Optimization Philippines

A Mike Lopez Search Engine Optimization Blog
Our Home Subscribe to our Feed


» Follow me on Twitter

No offense to the guys at Google but I just feel like posting about this.  I searched for “google toolbar” in Google and I found this ad in Tagalog.

Bad tagalog in Google toolbar ad

Take a look at the text in the ad.  It says, “Magpasadya ng pindutan sa browser, itigil mga pop-up atbp. - Libre

If you know how to speak tagalog then you’re most probably laughing right now or at least lifted one eyebrow.  Either Google hired a bad translator OR is using a bad translation engine. Either way… I think they need to change the wordings. :D

Go google!


» Follow me on Twitter

Follow me on Twitter

I admit, I just copied and pasted this…  Just wanted to help promote it. :D

SEO Philippines is proud to announce the launch of the most ambitious SEO contest ever: the P600,000 Bayanihan SEO Contest.

Bayanihan (pronounced buy-uh-nee-hun) is a Filipino tradition wherein neighbors would help a relocating family by gathering under their house, and carrying it to its new location. More generally, the word bayanihan has come to mean a communal spirit that makes seemingly impossible feats possible through the power of unity and cooperation.

SEO Philippines takes the bayanihan spirit to the SEO world with the first ever social SEO contest. After two highly successful keyword ranking contests (Isulong SEOPH and Ituloy AngSulong) that saw individual SEOs fight for the top spot in all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN), we’re breaking new grounds by introducing a team-based point system that will revolutionize the way all future SEO contests are run.

Read more about this on Marc’s blog.

Will I join?  I guess it’s too late… the early birds are already blazing ahead.  Worst, I’ve got lots of things at hand.  While I do want to win a contest as prestigious as this, I simply can’t dedicate some time for it so instead of burning myself out, I guess the next better thing to do is to wish luck to all the contestants and be present on the awards night. :)

Good luck to all contestants!


It’s official and final.  24 hours ago, Benj’s friends and colleagues started congratulating him for sticking to the #1 position in the SEO World Championship’s “globalwarming awareness2007″ contest with his www.goglobalwarmingawareness2007.com entry but that wasn’t official just yet as the contest staff needs to evaluate the winning entries and check them for any violations.  Everybody waited until today when it was all announced.

And guess what… Benj Arriola held firmly to his position and was finally announced to be the winner of a Brand New Citroen C2 car while the 2nd and 3rd placers won a Carribean Cruise and a Sony Plasma TV respectively.  As always, I took a screenshot of the webpage announcing the winners to freeze this moment in time.


Click to Enlarge

Benj already gave thanks to all those who helped him by writing a blog post entitled “SEO World Championship is Over” which proves that such an endeavor as this cannot be accomplished alone.  While he did mention the typical tips to win such as “content is king” and that “design is important,” what took my attention most was when Benj said, “SEO is a pay-it-forward type of industry.  The more help you give out to other people, the more help you receive when you need it.”  This is indeed true and perhaps not only in the SEO world but in any other venture.

Well, that says it all.  Benj you’re great and you inspired many as seen here, here, and here.  Now, may I borrow that Citroen C2 and take it for a test drive?  Hehehe… Congratulations dude!

Find out how to get the highest search engine ranking for your website EVERY TIME.  Read Kamau Austin’s “Always on Top”


Will Benj Arriola get his Citroen C2 (first prize) in exchange for his SEO efforts?  Many Filipinos and non-Filipinos all over the world watched the clock tick waiting if Mr. Arriola’s globalwarming awareness2007 entry will keep his #1 spot on this year’s SEO World Championship.  The contest officially ended on May 1st 6pm EST (May 2nd 8pm in the Philippines) and Benj didn’t let go.  He went through it and stayed on top.

But wait…

While we already know that Benj stayed on top, there are still a few things to check and one important factor that is causing and will be causing tension for the next 24 hours is whether Benj Arriola followed the webmaster guidelines presented at here.  If he breaks any of the guidelines mentioned then he may just lose his trophy and end up with nothing.

“I do not see my entry breaking any guideline,” said Benj so we all look forward to a worldwide announcement.

Another troubling thing is the following statement posted on the contest’s official website

The Seo World Championship 2007 has just ended. The GetUpdated staff will present the winners within 24 hours. The rankings have been checked manually by 3 staff members to make sure that the score is calculated correctly. (The current scorecard might not reflect the actual winners) Thank you for participating!

Will Benj’s site remain on top after the manual calculations are made by the SEO World Championship 2007 staff?  We’ll find out tomorrow.  For now, let’s just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Find out how to get the highest search engine ranking for your website EVERY TIME.  Read Kamau Austin’s “Always on Top”


On the first of May 2007, we will find out if Mr. Benj Arriola will get the top prize for joining the SEO World Championship contest.  The rule is simple - beat your opponents by gaining the top cumulative rank in the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) for the keyphrase globalwarming awareness2007.

The first time Benj told me about this, I knew that it was going to be a tough job but apparently Mr. Arriola was able to hone his search engine optimization skills by joining other contests before.  Whatever technique he’s using - no one knows and I can’t tell either but one thing’s for sure - he knows what he needs to do and he does it well.


Screenshot of Benj’s Entry


Benj grabs #1 spot with his entry

Benj’s website entry for this contest can be found at www.goglobalwarmingawareness2007.com and a quick look at the top-right corner of the SEO contest’s official website reveals that he’s currently ranking number 1 based on contest mechanics.  Will he keep the spot until May 1?  No one can really tell - search engines are known for random fluctuations - but if all goes well, Benj might just grab the gold.

Kudos to you Benj!

Technorati Tags: , ,

Powered by ScribeFire.


One common belief among webmasters is that good search engine ranking can be achieved by having lots of relevant pages on your website.  While this is true, many webmasters also take advantage of this fact by scraping content from other websites in an effort to fill their own websites with ‘good’ content.  Because of this, we see more and more websites that may rank well but makes no sense to the reader.  In other words, lots of webmasters feed the search engines but not the human reader.

It is worth noting however that this method is against Google’s webmaster guidelines as it tarnishes the motto of providing good and relevant search results to the internet user.  Because of this, Google is therefore “willing to take action against domains that try to rank more highly by just showing scraped or other autogenerated pages that don’t add any value to users.”

So all ye scrapers out there.. beware!


The search engines are getting smarter than ever and they have become so complex that not even their own engineers can predict the outcome of the search results. Recently, the major search engines especially Google adopted what is called Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) / Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to determine the overall theme of a website. LSI is defined as follows:

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is a technique in natural language processing, in particular in vectorial semantics, patented in 1988 [1] by Scott Deerwester, Susan Dumais, George Furnas, Richard Harshman, Thomas Landauer, Karen Lochbaum and Lynn Streeter. In the context of its application to information retrieval, it is sometimes called latent semantic indexing (LSI) - http://www.cs.utk.edu/~lsi/

LSA uses a term-document matrix which describes the occurrences of terms in documents; it is a sparse matrix whose rows correspond to documents and whose columns correspond to terms, typically stemmed words that appear in the documents. A typical example of the weighting of the elements of the matrix is tf-idf (term frequency–inverse document frequency): the element of the matrix is proportional to the number of times the terms appear in each document, where rare terms are up weighted to reflect their relative importance.

This matrix is common to standard semantic models as well (though it is not necessarily explicitly expressed as a matrix, since the mathematical properties of matrix are not always used).

What does all of this mean in English? Well, it’s pretty simple for the human brain to comprehend, but complicated to approximate mathematically. Essentially, what all of this means for the average site builder is that instead of thinking exclusively in terms of niches and whole pages based on single keywords, you should think more about organizing whole thematic relationships in contextual hierarchies sometimes called inverted pyramids, Silos or Matrices? Pages and sites should contain thematically related words and subdivisions rather than being completely keyword centric and the linking in general should flow from general to specific.

Confused? Well, you don’t have to…

Click here to get the LSI report today and have it all clarified.

And please do yourself a favor, get the report now or you risk getting left behind.


One Niche a Day

Mar 05 2007 12:51pm · No Comments
 Mike Lopez · Search Engine Optimization

Ever wondered on what niche market should you focus on?  If you’re a search engine marketer like me then you’re most likely thinking of new possibilities everyday and God knows how tough is it to come up with another good niche - or should it be?

I’ll keep this post short and simple as all I want to do is share with you something important that will transform your day-to-day niche finding into something real productive.  It’s called Niche A Day - enter your email address and get the top 1000 keyword lists for each passing day - for FREE.

Well, just go to the website and find out for yourself how powerful this tool can be.


Fellow SEO Philippines member Abel and I were talking last week about keyword research and adwords. We both use SEO Elite for our SEO endeavors and we both look forward to purchasing a copy of Keyword Elite as well. I realized however that Abel is one step ahead of me when he mentioned that he’s using another tool for his keyword research. I asked what it is and he pointed me out to NicheBOT.

As soon as he told me about NicheBOT, my next question was, how much did it cost you? I was expecting him to tell me an amount of at least $100 but I was wrong. He got his account (and I got mine too) for only one dollar ($1.00) only! Yeah, the $1.00 is only for a 14-day trial account which also comes with 15 free credits but believe me when I say that it’s worth it. You’ll be amazed by how much information you can get with that $1.00. I was able to gather enough information to start 5 SEO and adwords campaigns with that one dollar. Amazing - no hype here - it’s just amazing.

If I were you, I’d give NicheBOT a spin - after all, it’s just $1.00.

More NicheBOT Links:


How to do keyword research

Jan 28 2007 09:18pm · No Comments
 Mike Lopez · Search Engine Optimization

Keyword research is one of the most important facets of Search Engine Optimization and in my case, I usually spend weeks doing my research trying to look for the best keywords to optimize on. Weighing competition versus the number of searches made and so on is just pretty tiring at times. Gladly, I do use some software to help me out. Tools such as Keyword Elite and SEO Elite just made my life easier.

On the other hand, if you prefer to do it the hard way, then I could say is that this How to do Keyword Research article by Benj is one heck of a guide that will definitely help your way out. Even if you plan to use software such as the one I recommended above, you may still want to read Benj’s article as it will give you a good insight on keyword research.

Then and again, if you want to do things easier, then check out the following software:



In Search of Optimization · Template by Mike Lopez
Start a Franchising Business in the Philippines