When is PPC Advertising a Practical Move?
We all know how SEO can improve your website traffic on a long-term basis. After all of the success stories of people who actually made it to the top because of tremendous traffic from search engines, you could be asking yourself, “Why should I opt for PPC Advertising when there is a cheaper alternative?”.
The answer is quite simple. PPC Advertising, though it costs some money, will actually help you while you are still in the process of building your site’s online reputation. During the first months of your business, you cannot possibly make great traffic from your SEO campaigns since we all know that SEO will take effect sometime during the 3rd-6th month. Though PPC requires some dough, it would be well worth it for businesses who are selling products and services.
For example, if I want to sell web development services and I want to get clients immediately after launching my website, I cannot make miracles and get interested people to visit my site during the first 24 hours of operation. But with an advertising campaign and a few bucks to spare, I can get some decent traffic from search and several content networks.
Targeted traffic from SEO doesn’t come as early as a day after you launched your business, maybe not even in a month. Should you need to find a way to get visitors for your site who could be interested with making business with you, try to opt for PPC Advertising while you are working on your organic rankings.
Local Search | Local SEO Introduction
For most businesses that are only targeting local customers, there is no need to have a website that is seen all over the web. Not only that this is a waste of bandwidth, but it will also cost a lot of SEO effort just to have your business seen by uninterested people.
A majority of these businesses are hardwares, restaurants, hotels, and other types of local establishments who just want to have just some decent local exposure. For these types of businesses, Local SEO is much more effective.
Why is Local SEO effective?
- Local SEO is effective since it saves you the time to rank for keywords that will unlikely give you clients. Of course, only people searching from your area are potential customers, it is best to keep it that way since inbound traffic coming from other regions won’t likely boost your business exposure.
- Local SEO minimizes the competition. If you are to target the national or the global community, you will need to exert more SEO effort in order to be seen. Whereas ranking for local searches is easier compared to the above mentioned.
To be continued…
The Google Panda: How Hard Did it Slap You?
Apr 27, 2011 SEO
For the past few months, the Google Panda has been a heavily debated topic all around the interwebs. The said update, having greatly affected search engine ranking results have sparked outrage to a great number of website owners including some of the top tech blogs in the United Kingdom.
As for how this blog was affected, I myself was greatly slapped by the Google Panda, though I was looking for something even bigger since I never actually had the time to maintain this website or to post new articles. I have been too busy with web development stuff, so I barely had the time to think of new stuff to write about.
The good thing is, The Panda didn’t slap me too hard because of the fact that I don’t even build links and attempt to manipulate my rankings. It could be coincidental or I could be on the right track of maintaining just a natural flow of links to this website. This is a personal blog, it is not like I am planning to make hard cash on it.
As for what I see, Google targets spam and poor content even more. I have seen some websites who have quickly risen up in the rankings just because they have really informative content. I have been making searches and I barely see keyword-rich pages unlike before, when I was searching for cheap iPhones and it directed me to a webpage full of keyword crap.
As you can see, I don’t offer much information on this website. I only write about tidbits of what I think about the search engine algorithm changes and some web development stuff. But I do think that Google still loves me. lol
Reversed Link Building Pros and Cons
Mar 17, 2011 SEO
Reversed link building is a new term coined for the act of doing the actual off-page SEO process in reverse, that is why it is called such. Instead of doing the actual link posting activity, you will work on removing your competitor links from other websites. You can either remove links from wiki sites simply by editing the pages where their links are located or you can email webmasters that link to your competition and give them a valid reason on why your competitor’s link should be removed.
When Does it Work?
- If your competitor has a few links and is relatively a new site, it would be a good idea to take of his edge and make the battle a bit one-sided. Search for his wiki links and start editing those pages replacing their precious link with yours. They will surely blow their heads off wondering what could have gone wrong.
- If you have tons of money to pay webmasters link spaces, then I guess it would be better if you do so. They will certainly scream in terror once they find out that Richie Rich eliminated them from the competition.
When Does it NOT Work?
- If you do not have enough backlinks, then forget it. Focus on your own before you decide playing other games. This game would be not for you.
- If you don’t have the money, don’t pay for what you can’t earn. Remember that the internet is all about business and it is not about who ranks first, but who sells the most.
I guess this post will be updated even more. I am a bit tired right now to brainstorm. What are your insights?
Email Marketing and How it can Boost your Business
Feb 1, 2011 Make Money Online, SEO
Email marketing is a concept developed by webmasters who wanted to go far beyond search engine rankings. For your website to gain visibility, it is important to consider having other methods besides paying for Search Engine Rankings or building tons of links.
The answer to this puzzle has long been debated and tackled, and they all came up with only one thing; to have a direct contact with internet users. Thus, email marketing was born.
Email marketing actually is an art, and less of a science. You must properly understand how minds think, not how they work. Creating a selling flyer is not about design principles, it is about the interest that it can generate. These things are really important for your email marketing to yield results.
SEO wouldn’t be enough, this is what people see when they hear about email marketing. But just like SEO, there are certain limits to email marketing, and one of them is the common SPAM problem. If you’d clearly remember, about 1997 was the last year when SPAM was only found in cans.
However, setting the “can” thing aside, spamming can occur in different methods, and the most popular would probably be sending the same email to tons of users everytime. This will not only mark you as a spammer, but your domain and hosting account can be in a really great trouble as well. If your IP gets blocked, it is now time to say goodbye to your email marketing dreams.
Anyway, the most important tip that I can share would be to just take care and enjoy sending emails, but don’t overdo it.
P.S. Please bookmark my entry for makeityourring diamond engagement rings
Multiple Links in 1 Page
Jan 18, 2011 SEO
Ok, I have to say first that I read this article from SEOMoz (before someone accuses me of stealing anybody’s idea) that a page can accommodate multiple links to a URL with different anchor texts. It sounded like an old myth busted, but being the critic that I am, I decided to check it out for myself.
I used one of my old blogs and wrote a random article on it, something that I want to target for nonsense keywords. And believe it or not, this is the actual test. Note the search results if ever they are indexed and let’s see for ourselves if that actually works.
Of course, the test keywords that I used contain no search results, so I can really test the validity and finally set the facts straight.
So, here are the anchor texts that I used:
Because I am a bit lazy, you can just check the links for the URLs and you can check that they are actually pointing to the same URL, but the URL is a bit varied.
And since I am not quite fond of posting images in this blog as you might have noticed, just because I am poor and I cannot afford unlimited hosting (Don’t believe me, I am obviously lying. lol), just check out the search results and see if the test indeed worked.
NOTE: Please be patient as this may take some time. Remember that the post has to be indexed first. And don’t even complain about not seeding any results from this test. But if you would like to complain, you can pay me $10 and I’d gladly accommodate that for you. lol
Flash and SEO: My Insights
According to recent news, flash is finally being spidered by search engines. I personally think that it is about time that flash content finally gets indexed by search engines since flash has more design possibilities compared to the traditional HTML output.
As said from a blog (which I don’t remember), Google has finally come up with an algorithm that can dig through text objects inside a flash content. The only problem however, is that converted text (movie files, images, etc) is still invisible to the spider’s eyes.
Aside from indexing flash content, I would suggest that Google comes up with a way of reading text in images too. I mean, they came up with an image search available on android and iPhone, where you can just use and image to search for relevant articles, images, or to identify a person. Why don’t they come up with a way to index the text within the image as well?
Well, I’m not saying that Google is stupid or anything, but I think it is a good move aside from the resolved flash issues.
Anyway, back to the topic, here are my insights on Flash and SEO.
- Animated text are not read by the spider, since they are considered more as movie clips, not as images.
- Flash sites are usually 1 page sites, so they will be indexed as much as a squeeze page is.
- Flash is still not a good choice for an easy-to-rank website, since more pages with keyword relevance is always the priority of search engines.
Good move though, just a little more improvement in Google’s search algorithms and I think flash will finally make it. And I do hope that they will also come up of ways to battle spam too.
Top 5 Blog Commenting Tips and Tricks | SEO 101
Dec 27, 2010 SEO
Blog commenting, though one of the most frowned upon techniques in building links and search engine optimization due to spamming issues, is definitely one of the golden PR juice providers.
After a few months that I have been busy and never had the time to write articles in my SEO Blog, I decided to share some tips in blog commenting as a comeback article.
I know you don’t want to be overloaded with my stories, so here are the techniques that I use in blog commenting:
1. Evaluate the site that you are commenting on, does it allow blog comments that have keyword names or does it even approve blog comments? It is important that you check the comments section first before wasting your time writing about your feedback.
2. Make a sensible blog comment. These are mostly approved by blog owners and also makes a good impression to other users. If you can clearly state your point with a specific topic, users might be interested to read your articles and make comments on your blog as well.
3. I myself am tired of “Thanks for the wonderful post” comments, and so as other website owners. Make sure that you will write something from what you read, not what is saved in your text editor that you post on a copy paste basis.
4. Take advantage of commentluv, it allows name@keyword comments which could pass a reasonable amount of link juice to your site. Check if the site has one, and make it to a point that you write your name in the specified format.
5. Do not ever make comments just to increase links, remember that the internet is a community for web users and not a place to post spam. If you want to spam, take it elsewhere, the blogging community is slowly getting renegade with spamming nowadays.
Well, these are just what I would like to share for now. These tips will surely help you out with your linkbuilding campaigns. Remember that being a critic is better than being a robot, and a critic’s comments are more accepted by webmasters.
Linkbait 101: Tips and Tricks in Creating Linkbait Articles
Nov 16, 2010 SEO
Linkbait article writing is one of the less-known but really effective methods of getting organic targeted traffic for your site. The linkbait concept is basically an article that gets the reader’s sympathy and attracts him to link your article from his site. It is one of the best natural linkbuilding methods in my own opinion.
I wrote this article for the purpose of explaining people how linkbait works, for an example of a linkbait article, here’s an article on squidoo for a solar training company.
The article can be found here.
Here are the top 5 tips when creating linkbait articles:
1. Make your article as interesting as possible. Try to read it a couple of times before posting and ask your friends for their comments before getting it live on the web. Otherwise, some uninterested users might spread the message really quick and get the exact inverse of the results that you are expecting.
2. Do not ever copy and paste content from the web. There are keen users that are likely to check if you copy-pasted the article that you used, and this could lead you to trouble. If you think you can easily get away with stealing other people’s work, think again.
3. Write what you think makes your article the best from the others. Remember that there is a certain point of interest for people to link back to you. Writing in an uninteresting manner and otherwise poorly constructed form will, seriously, lead to a big disaster.
4. Make it to a point that you will approve related comments to your article regularly. Mark anything unrelated as spam and retain the valid comments. Do not fear negative comments as they can be of great help to you in the long run. Long discussions tend to pull of more traffic for your website.
5. Make your article long enough, maybe a minimum of 300 words to state all points that you want to relate. Do not think of the greater time you will spend in writing, the number of links that you will get will definitely pay off.
Now, back to the solar training article. You can see that the points are clearly stated and the information, though not perfect seems complete. It is important to make the users feel that you are actually writing for them to get the best information they can get on a specific topic.
The 7-Day SEO Program
Oct 10, 2010 SEO
During some of my free time these past few months, I compiled some information on how I build links and how I rank sites. After reviewing all the information that I have gathered, I have come up with an amazing (well, at least for me) method for doing SEO campaigns. I am currently on the process of writing a book about it, and I’ll be releasing it some time this year.
The basic concept of the 7-Day SEO Program is simple, it is a day to day plan of how you will build links for your site in an efficient manner. Unlike other books that teach its readers how to do SEO campaigns, I made sure that the 7-Day SEO Program will be a 4-hour daily basis to ensure that the readers will have so much time to do any other things.
To give you a hint, here are some of the things that are and will be included in the official release:
- Effective Linkbuilding Techniques
- Linkbuilding Techniques That Have Little To No Effect
- Daily Linkbuilding Plan
- Article Writing Tips
- Linkwheel Creation
I am planning to release the book sometime in December, maybe before the year ends. To all people who are waiting for a significant contribution in the field of internet marketing from me, just wait until December until I finish writing all my stuff down…
Special Thanks to Haydee Canete
Top 5 Common Misconceptions About SEO
Sep 30, 2010 SEO
Following a “Top 5″ post is another one about SEO. Well, as much as I want to discuss some Social Media techniques, I don’t want my seldom genius ideas to fade into dust, so let’s discuss about some common misconceptions about SEO first.
A lot of SEOs have been sharing the rants of their clients to me, some of them might sound right, but they actually aren’t.
1. “If I’m ranked first in Google, then I should get more sales!”
Yes, that makes sense, at least for the common person. You might be on the first position, but remember that the customer still decides where to purchase products. If your products are a bit crappy compared to those who are in the 2nd and 3rd position, then you must not be puzzled why you are not getting any sales for the past few weeks.
2. “SEO is a never ending process”
Some SEOs say this, but I actually disagree. I have seen some sites and pages who had no linking activity for over a year, and they are still on number 1. The main reason why this concept was materialized is that SEO companies would likely want to retain you as their client. If it doesn’t make sense, try it out for yourself. Build 100,000 links for a year and stop. After that, just update your posts regularly and see if your site won’t rank.
3. “Only High Traffic Keywords Sell”
Think again. Some people are really desperate and asks Google, “Where can I find a damn car?” Well, that was the last thing that I searched, and there came results. Even eHow utilizes this concept. How to articles are not searched all the time, but they surely generate a lot of traffic given their wide array of how to articles from making the stupidest stuff to recreating Einstein inventions.
4. “Make those images all text for search engine issues”
If you are wise enough, you are making content for the users, and not for the search engines, you need to decorate your site at some point to make it interesting to the viewer’s eyes. If you would resort into making your content all search engine friendy and an eye sore to the common user, you might as well ask the search engine to buy your products or to click your ads.
5. “Nofollow links are useless”
At least for search engine rankings, but as for page indexing and crawling, it is actually effective, not to mention the amount of traffic that it could generate. Digg won’t be living up to now if nofollow links are totally useless. So it is important to utilize not only the dofollow link sources, but to consider posting links on nofollow sites as well for a greater traffic potential. Remember that there has been a myth that traffic is one of the top search engine factors, which I believe is true.
The next time that you hear one of these, you do have an answer to your clients. Remember that they are hiring you to do SEO for their sites simply because they cannot do it for themselves, they wouldn’t be spending their hard-earned money on you if they can. They just have a few small questions about what they read on the internet, and this page is the answer.
The Important Steps in Article Writing
Article Writing by far is one of the most effective linkbuilding methods. Though reliable, a downside of article writing is the time it takes to get one article up and running.
So, for today’s first installment of my article blast, I’ll be writing some of the important steps in article writing…
Research
It is important that you are to research about the article you are writing. Writing from pure scratch could provide the wrong impression to your readers. As much as possible, 50% of your writings should be based from facts and it is up to you if you are to
Organize
After that you have collected the data that you will need, it is time to arrange the important details to make your facts clear. No matter how detailed your information is, arranging it in a random manner will not work.
Write
Now, once all ideas are set, it is time to make a draft of your article. After making an outline of your work, it is time to input the necessary information to each part of your article. Make sure to clearly detail your opinions if you have any, and make your content organized as much as possible to avoid confusing the reader.
Proofread
This step more likely will be the “testing stage”. There are only 2 basic steps in proofreading; check if your article has errors and read it not as the author but as the targeted audience. If your article has passed proofreading even for the first time and you believe that it is fit for publishing, you don’t have to go to the next step.
Rewrite
Like most products of labor, you have to make necessary fixes to your article in case you find any errors. After this step, you should go back to step 4 – and as long as you think that your article is still not fit for publishing. It will be a continuous loop until your article has achieved perfection.
My Article Blast Day
For today, since I am totally free and got nothing much to do, I will be blasting you guys with tons of articles. Well, not really tons, but maybe a few just to have some content in this blog.
I am a bit concerned about how this blog has been online for a few months, and I haven’t posted that much, lacking information and all that stuff.
So, here are some topics that I’m planning to write for today.
- Entering The Domain Selling Business
- Linkbuilding Techniques
- Search Engine Algorithm Changes
Well, not really that much, but at least I get to share information with you guys.
Google Instant Search
Sep 9, 2010 SEO
Just yesterday, or maybe a few days before (Yup, I haven’t been searching for stuff for a while), Google just launched Google Instant, a new way of searching stuff on Google. If you have searched recently, you might find that as you type, search results are appearing below the search bar, as if you are pressing enter for every character that you type.
I personally like how Google devised a way to do this. As you are checking for your long tail keywords, you are also seeing results for your shorter tail keywords, which are basically a part of your search term. If you are an SEO, you might want to consider using this to identify if your long tail SEO campaign is working for your shorter keyphrases.
The disadvantage? Confusion. There will always be a major disarray whenever people encounter something new. Google has made minor changes this year, but this could be the biggest change in Google this year aside from Google Caffeine.
For search algorithms, I haven’t tested it out myself, but I sure do hope that there is no major change in it. There has been no official statement yet from Google Webmaster Help if the change has an impact with the search algorithms. However, Google claims that it has been changing search algorithms per day, but I do hope that it would not turn into something like Bing which prefers spammy old sites with spammy old links.
Tags: google, google instant search, SEO, seo blog
TNASISSTANT LATRIUV: WordPress Post Backdating
Sep 3, 2010 Events, Make Money Online, SEO
This post tackles 2 things. About a keyword that has no returning search results and wordpress backdating.
This entry, TNASISSTANT LATRIUV was posted on May 4, 2011 but was backdated to September 3, 2010 for no other purposes but to discuss the said topics.
What is TNASISSTANT LATRIUV?
TNASISSTANT LATRIUV, Richard Tuazon’s SEO experimental keyword, is just a combination of random letters used to test how the Google Panda affects websites. The keyword has been undergoing a top secret experiment since May 3 until it has been unveiled on their website sometime in 2011. The experiment results are aimed to be published in public sometime in June.
Why Backdate Posts?
As a participant of the said experiment, this post was intentionally backdated to see if Google will see the page as an old page though it was published just recently. The test will see if the page will be indexed after a ping quickly considering that new entries of this blog are quickly indexed by the search engines. As for the TNASISSTANT LATRIUV keyword, it will be used insted of the site command to make sure that it is searchable and will not be sandboxed to see if there are possible repercussions of the act.
Let the experimentation begin!
