Archive for the ‘SEO’ Category
When to Stop Building Links?
You should never stop building links; you should always be on guard for sites vying for the same keywords. Everybody wants to be on the first page of Google, Yahoo or Bing and when you reached that target it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stop. Let’s not forget that being visible on the web opens a door for bigger opportunities. If you want to stop building links just because you reached your target, ask yourself if you’re ready to lose your spot on the search engine result page (SeRP), maybe then you’ll have a second thought.
Building links is easy you just have to do it the right way to prevent being considered as a spammer. Another, you also need to educate yourself from time to time of other ways to get a free traffic or a back link to your site. It’s not just about Directory Submission, Article Submission, Blog Commenting or participating in community forums, if you know how to strategize, you’re up for a hundred possibilities. You don’t have to tire yourself writing articles all over again, comment to blog post you’re not interested reading, try out something new. I’m not saying article marketing is not an effective tool. All I’m saying is, sometimes building links doing the same activity could be tiring plus if you don’t try out something new, you’ll never know which works best or which also drive traffic to your site.
If you’ve reached your target, keep on building links, but this time ADD something new to the activities that brought you to the first page of SeRP. Also, add a new keyword to target, remember, you don’t need to stop targeting the same keywords, you only have to add additional keyword to the list and promote it as well. You can strategize on this one. Believe it or not, it could drive more traffic to your site without losing your position – more traffic to a new set of keywords added, therefore, expanding your horizon.
Don’t stop building links…just be creative…strategize…
Secrets Revealed to Using White Hat Method
Optimizing a site may sound simple, perhaps simple in context if you know the standards set by Search Engines but could get really complicated when it comes to implementation. We already know what on-page optimization is but for those who don’t, it’s the first step to optimizing a site for SE – work within the elements of your site.
- Do create quality content or relevant information but Don’t overstuff it with keywords.
- Do use Keyword Tag but Don’t provide too much keyword 5-7 keywords will do.
- Do use keywords on Title and Description Tags but Don’t overstuff it.
- Do use Alt Tags but Don’t use it to stuff keywords, use only what is relevant.
- Do use Anchor text but Don’t use anchor text to mislead users.
If you notice I mentioned keyword stuffing several times, this is because abusing keywords is a black hat technique. Be reminded also that even if it’s not visible to the end- users how you stuff keywords, like changing the colour of the text to match the background, it can be read by SE. For on-page optimization, there’s not so much to do actually except that you have to update it from time to time to adapt with the current SE standard. Below are other things you could DO to optimize your site:
- Use keywords on your URL structure if it’s relevant to the content, example:
Instead of just www.yoursebsite.com/services use www.yourwebsite.com/seo-service.html or www.yourwebsite.com/linkbuilding-services.html this way you links are also optimized. For products, use relevant keyword for your URL structure related to your page. It’s not keyword stuffing since it will be related to your page’s content.
- Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for leaner code. A well optimize site should also allow SE to read its code easily, by separating content and style sheets you can attain this.
- Use Site Map to easily navigate to your site.
These are secrets to a well optimized site using white hat method. The critical part though is finding the right keywords. The secrets are now revealed what you could do now is finding the right keywords and then adapt this.
VBEC Seminar On E-business at Eagle’s Nest
Today, Saturday May 8th, 2010 morning I attended an e-business seminar arranged by Vaughan Business Center in Vaughan, Ontario. Well, I guess I should say yesterday morning as it is now 12:34 am Sunday morning EST.
Anyway, it was really nice to see our good old Dolores Rotondo back at VBEC (centrebusiness.com) after her 9 months of absence. Teresa is gone which is a good thing for us as we had some conflicts of interest in the past.
The first part of the seminar was presented by Andrew of Biz Launch. I had attended a few of Andrew’s seminars in the previous years. He is simply an amazing presenter. I always enjoyed his seminars before and I did again this (yesterday) morning. He has a way of making the seminars more interesting. A nice touch of humour and his efforts to engage the audience always works like a charm for me ie. I actually stayed awake through the entire presentation.
Andrew talked about the importance of social media exposures for businesses. I realized once again, this is something we just all have to do to promote our business. This is a powerful marketing tool that we have not fully utilized yet for our own marketing campaign thou we do this for our clients. Well, you know we wouldn’t exactly get paid to do it for ourselves thou 
The second part of the seminar was not too productive for me. This part of the seminar was run by a guy name Bruno. The guy was running a seminar on Search Engine Optimization yet, his only experience seemed to have been SEO for his own website! And guess what? This experience seemed to also have been based mainly on “onsite SEO” only. I guess any website owner with some SEO success in olden days when SEO was easier could just start running seminars on SEO now.. ya’ know I helped passing a few pieces of wood last year when my father-in-law was building me a deck in the backyard. I guess I should now start running seminars on carpentry! Viola!
He did not seem to have separated SEO from web design either. According to him (like many others) the web designer is the SEO expert.. well, on the other hand, web designers as well quite frequently mislead people by saying they would include SEO in their web design cost (say what? All these months of SEO work for free??).
Anyways, the food that followed his seminar was good so overall it was worth attending the seminar. Pino and I spoke with Andrew afterwards as well as Judith, a business consultant. We are sure to hook up again in the coming weeks. And oh! I gotta drop by talk to Dolores tomorrow about some ideas I have.
2nd Day Insider Secrets to a Google – Friendly Website
Google cares more about their users rather than those people spending huge amount of money to advertise their site. Regardless whether you give Google $10k a month for your PPC campaign, they can actually slap you anytime, “Google slap” as they call it. Another thing I learn, I’m not an expert on PPC (Pay per Click) yet, I only use it on my own personal site and I learn that you cannot just pause and play campaigns, just to test, there are other way of doing it. Why, your historical CRT (Click Through Rate) matters a lot. The acceptable CTR at least is 2%; Google actually monitors your activity and inactivity the first day you run a campaign. How do you measure CTR? It’s Click/Impression = CTR. And if you want to know your Ad Rank its CPC (Cost per Click x Quality Score). The CPC is the amount you’re willing to pay and Quality score covers your landing page, relevance of ad test, historical CTR, account performance and other relevant factors. In short, Quality Score encompass both your account performance as a whole and the quality of your website, which is quite a lot to discuss. Well, I can’t discuss it yet, I still have to attend another seminar this June on PPC, a hands-on coaching (I’m really excited on this one).
What else, I cannot actually reveal too much information since it’s a SECRET haha…just kidding. But as a whole, it was more geared toward harnessing the power of Social Media Marketing. What was actually exciting about the seminar was not the Insider Secrets itself, though it was the reason why I actually came but the tips you get from the experts themselves. I will be seeing them again this June and August for SEO and PPC. It’s always my goal to continuously improve, what works today may not work tomorrow. One example, the Page Rank, people are so focused on this, yes Google made an update this April and almost everybody notice an increase in their PR but it doesn’t really mean Google still uses PR. That was actually the question I raise during the seminar and was told by Simon Leung himself that PR is already obsolete.
One more I think you all should know: Google manually reviews each site/ads. They do have a system but the final decision still relies on the reviewer. Perhaps this is no longer a secret, there are just simple who don’t believe that they really conduct manual reviews, like the one who created a scene on the seminar, whoever the guy was, he was rude and today he didn’t come actually. Its okay to challenge the speaker but it’s not okay to be rude, there’s a proper way to argue your point. But I could attest to that, Google actually reviews your site, my personal site actually was blocked a year ago because of malware attacked, I contacted Google and within 2 days I got a response and my site was up again. Systems or software cannot interact with inquiries right, human intervention will always be there. Anyway, to wrap it up, I had fun, we had picture taking at the end of the day, and I have my certificate and a photo beside Simon Leung and Fabian Lim. It was great, this won’t be the last that I’ll be seeing this guys.
I need to take a rest now, it was a tiring day but I had fun.
1st Day Insider Secrets to a Google – Friendly Website
Just this morning I attended the 1st day of Insider Secrets to a Google – Friendly Website. The speaker was a Simon Leung, a retired most senior Google optimization specialist with guest speaker Fabian Lim who is currently the CEO of Internet Academy Pte Ltd. The event was sponsored by Powermax Consulting Group Inc. The topics covered were…well, of course we haven’t discussed some of the topic outlined below, I still have to attend to tomorrow though, but here it is:
· Crush All Your Competitors in Search Engines
· Overcome Automated Penalties to Your Websites
· Who Google Values More Than Their Highest Paying Advertisers
· The Biggest Mistake You Can Make on Your Websites
· Setting Up and Designing a Google Friendly Website Layout
· What Would Have Prevented Penalized Sites from Poor Quality
· Which Types of Website Google Associate with “Scams”
· Quality Score Elements You Must Be Mindful Of
· How to Set Up Your Navigational and Outbound Links
· Integrating Social Media on Your Site for Best Results
· One Simple Graphic That Instantly Increases Your Quality Score
· Essential Content Pages That Are Often Neglected On Most Sites
· Your Number One Goal For Every One Of Your Site’s Clicks
· Shocking Quality Criteria Most Websites Never Implement
· Building An Automated Lead Generation System The Right Way
The seminar was fine, the speakers of course are both good and the food served was great, lol. Though I can say that I am not new to this and would say perhaps Google Secret is not really a secret to me and for sure for other Internet Marketers out there, still attending this seminar is something I would opt to. Perhaps a confirmation if I was really doing it right and of course to gain competitive advantage, which definitely is my goal. It was an opportunity for me to listen to these people who have proved themselves well enough to earn six figures, that’s in US dollar. Both has its way of presenting their expertise, while Simon Leung highly recommend to harness the power of Social Media and to patronize its partners (love your own) Fabian Lim on the other hand presented his expertise by actually using a live site and do some googling on a particular term. This is by the way is very effective and I honestly learn new stuff in him with regards to keywords research. He will be here on July to conduct another seminar about SEO and Google Adwords, I don’t have the definite date yet but I will sure be attending. Anyway going back, there were 10 topics discussed today and as I’ve said earlier, I’m not new to this but it did meet my expectation.
Something I learn today about creating sales letter, I don’t know if you knew about this but I only learn it now. Long sales letter are conceived to be scams. I see a lot of that on the web; I’m honestly annoyed when I land on those pages with long sales letter. Simon Leong thought us how to create an effective sales letter, a landing, a call-to-action etc. In short, the seminar was A okay, plus the bonus of what I learn from Fabian Lim.
Tomorrow I’ll share what will happen on the event and perhaps share with you some links or photos of the events. For now I really have to rest from a long day’s event.
Google PageRank Update for 2010
I thought for a while PageRank was no longer one of the factors Google used to rank your site and now almost everybody seems to talk about it. For those who do not know, PageRank as described by Google:
“ relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.”
To simplify, it’s one of the factor used to measure a sites’ importance through the quality of links in terms of relevancy linking back to it. It is considered to be one of the most important factors to determine its Google Ranking on Search Engine Result Page (SeRP). The higher the PageRank the higher, the chance on appearing on SeRP.
Almost everybody was happy when Google rolled out PageRank for everybody. Well I guess guys we better continue our efforts to build links. We can never tell when Google is rolling out another PageRank for everyone.
What you need to know before Handling your own SEO Campaign
SEO to others may just be a link building effort alone but looking at the picture, you do not only build links for the sake of link popularity but you do it following a certain guidelines. In this case, not everybody is aware of what white and black hats are all about, or the penalty of not following the set standards of ethical link building.
Before you handle your own SEO campaign particularly for small business owners and individual who has their own web page, research is always the key. Yes, we want to cut down cost of marketing for your business but let’s not try to oversimplify SEO and look at the pros and cons of handling your own campaign.
The most common advantage of managing your own SEO is that, there is no additional overhead expense. Typically you just assigned it to someone as additional workload or you do it yourself if you’re just an individual trying to promote your profession. If you have a budget for it, you hire an additional person, which is cost-effective depending on the skills of your SEO campaign manager but can also be more expensive, again this will depend on the skill level. For those who only have at least 2 years experience, starting salary would be around $40,000 – $50,000 annually, which could go as high as $100,000.
Now for the cons, though money-wise, in-house SEO is a good move, but again, there are underlying factors that makes it a good investment. Not all in-house SEO campaign succeeds. Productivity-wise, in my opinion, it’s best to concentrate on your core competency. Setting and aligning goals could still be done even if you outsource your SEO, allowing you to focus on improving the products and service you provide. Another point, you do not have to worry about following SEO guidelines, appearing SeRP (Search Engine Result Page), link popularity, your SEO agency can handle those.
So before you decide if you will manage your own SEO campaign, weigh the pros and cons, you have to consider your resources. You will have to invest on both anyway so invest wisely.
Why you need more than just a Website
Although a website is the first step to succeed online, succeeding online don’t only rely on having a good site. It’s simply the first plan of action you need to implement before launching your site in the World Wide Web. Needless to say, it will be your store front to establish your online presence.
Before you start with the design, consider the fact that you need your site to work for Search Engines and end-users. You have to balance between the two, both are equally important for a website. You need more than just a website to launch an effective online campaign. Consider researching for keywords to use as your meta-tags, titles, description etc., learn the art of creating a navigation system that both users and spiders understand, create an XML site map etc. Visit this page on how to create an SEO Website Design Friendly.
Another thing, when I say more than just a website, it means worthy to be bookmarked as reference. Other site owners create a blog to share relevant information about the products and services they offer, while others provide a section for resources. You really don’t have to create a blog just to say you have one. You need to ask yourself this:
• Do I have passion for writing?
• Can I really maintain it?
These are just two of the questions you have to think over before launching your own blog (this will be discussed further on my next blog).
If what you have is more than just a website, then you don’t have to worry about on-site optimization. The next action you need to do is market your website doing off-site optimization. If you worked from the ground up, optimizing your site for Search Engine will not be as hard as it seems – less effort, more savings. Work from the ground up, learn the basics and avoid unnecessary processes to optimize a site. When the site is ready, you only need a good plan for your link building activities.
Scamming SEO Companies
There are scammers everywhere when it comes to the field of business and scammers won’t let the SEO services get away. Yes, there are also SEO companies who are nothing but scammers. Unfortunately, they still get to be successful in luring innocent people into their bait. Here are a few tips that you should know to avoid being one of the victims of SEO scammers.
Impossible Promises
Come on, we should get real here. There’s no way that a certain SEO company could give you a number one rank on Google in a matter of days. SEO is a continuous step-by-step process which helps your site to get up higher one at a time. Don’t fall for promises saying that they could get your site to page one of a search engine even if you’re beyond page ten. Keep in mind that SEO is not something that could be rushed. To be successful, patience is needed. It’s better to pay for a service that requires you to wait for a while but is sure to give you results than to pay for a service that promises fast results then leaving you with nothing.
Using Email for Marketing
If it’s a reliable SEO company that you want, you won’t find them in your e-mail’s Inbox or Spam folder. The best thing that you could do is to search for them in search engines. Companies with high page ranks are most probably trustworthy companies. Because if they offer SEO services then they should also be able to get their own sites have a higher page rank. Never fall for those who would email you saying “Your site is not listed in search engines” then would start offering services to get your site listed and even give you a high page rank.
Get Famous in Thousands of Search Engines
Sure this will really be pleasing to the ears of someone who wants their site to be as popular as they want. But thousands of search engines are just useless if you would think of it. The ones you should be concerned of are the big players such as Yahoo, Google, Bing, etc. Fraud SEO companies will just spread your site everywhere and that would do no good to you. It will just send minimal or worse, no traffic at all to your site and worse than that, your site could get penalized for spamming the web.
Research
Always look at the company’s background. Search for satisfied clients. Review their history and note any suspicious acts and information. Be vigilant. It’s better to be extra careful than be a victim of scammers. You will surely lose money if you rush into things without doing your research.
Being a victim of a scammer can always be avoided. Make sure you take all of these things into consideration when choosing the company for SEO services. Because when it’s too late, it’s impossible to get your money back and your site will be left to rot. These scammers are fast and smart. The key is to outsmart them by being careful.
How to Create SEO Website Design Friendly
A website should be eye catching to attract visitors. It should also be very search engine friendly. What matters aside from being user friendly is that it’s searchable on the web, otherwise, your website is useless.
How do we create an SEO friendly web design?
If you use flash on the entire website, you will have to put double the work to make it search engine firendly. Search Engine (SE’s) ignores Flash, therefore, you will also need a non-flash version of your website. If you really need to use flash, make sure that you have an alternative textual description that can be understood by SE spiders. Otherwise, you can also use web 2.0 technology to put your content first before your flash designs.
When using images, be sure to fill-in “name” and “alt” tags. The graphical image itself cannot be seen by SE spider, it is through this tags that SE spider interpret your website. Use relevant description only and do not try to deceive SE spider.
Avoid using frames, SE spiders have no way to interpret content on a frame.
Use CSS navigation and style sheets, doing so makes your navigational menu crawl-able and indexable by SE spider. Using Javascript and Flash do not have the same result – it is unseen by SE spiders. So if you have javascript or flash on your site, you also need to have simple texts of the same message you put in Javascript or flash.
Though it’s not a requirement to use CSS stylesheets, it will help your site to load faster.
Conduct a Keyword Research to use on your meta tags and contents but also avoid keyword stuffing, suggested keyword density is 3-5%. For the title tag, characters should be at lest 70 and 150 for the description. Have at least 5-8 important keywords listed in your keyword tag.
Also, use keyword researched on your anchor text, H1, H2 and H3 as much as possible. This will help you rank in Search Engine Result Page (SeRP).
Create SEO friendly URL, incorporate your keyword related to your web page. Use dashes to separate words.
Structure your site up to 3 levels deep; Google only sees three-levels deep.
Provide useful content and make sure to have at least 250 words each web page since some SE spiders requires at least 250 to analyze your site. Make it a point as well that content on your site coincide with keywords used, else, SE spider will find it of little value.
Lastly, provide a site map.
Having an optimized site works well with your SEO campaign, the second step now depends on you.
If you like this article you may want to read 10 Tips on Search Engine Optimization