My online Manifesto

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one internet marketing strategy that any internet entrepreneur would want for their website. Well maybe except for those that really established a strong name over the web, but as for those that started out in ecommerce would really need to learn about SEO. Let’s get to the point, SEO is used as a way to raise a website’s rank in any search engine like Yahoo! and Google (any of the top 10 slots will do, but It’ll be greater if it would be in top 1). By doing so, the possibility of visitors that visits a website would increase, thus increasing sales and profit margin. So long-story-short, SEO is all about increasing the visibility of a website in the world wide web by use of search engines. Now the question is, how do you do SEO?
SEO companies are now available for hire around the world, such as SEO Philippines companies. Some companies have outsourced their SEO needs to these establishments. But it can also be done by anyone that knows basic SEO procedures, even at home. So here is a step-by-step, do-it-yourself, guide on SEO and how to increase visibility in the world wide web.
Step 1: Get Your Keywords
The first step that any SEO Philippines company would do is to research on keywords that perfectly describes the website. Free online keyword research tools like Google Adwords Keyword tool or SEO Book’s Keyword tool are popularly used by many SEO specialists. Highly competitive keywords is the main ingredient in any successful SEO dish. But highly competitive doesn’t only describe single words such as “SEO”, it also emphasizes on the keyword structure, if it really describes the website like “SEO service in the Philippines”.
Note: In a keyword research, always make sure that the keywords are relevant to the website to be optimized. Irrelevant keywords pointing to a website could earn a one way trip to “Ban“svill courtesy of search engines.
Step 2: Know Your Enemies
Well not exactly “enemies” per-se, but competitors. After doing a keyword research, It’s time to look up on your competitors by use of your chosen keywords. Try looking at what SEO tactics or strategies they’ve done. By viewing their source code (ctrl+U for Firefox), you can see the keyword density, meta tags they used, alt tags, and title tags (I’ll explain these later on). To learn the number backlinks (I’ll explain these later on) of a website, try using SEOpen’s free backlink tool, this way you’ll know what you have to beat to gain their spot. Using your competitor’s strength against them is one successful way to succeed in an SEO campaign.
Step 3: Start On-Page SEO
So here we’ll start the first pace of SEO, the on-page optimization. Actually, SEO is divided into 2 parts, the on-page and off-page (which I’ll discuss later on). On-page optimization involves making changes within the website to make it more “search engine friendly”. The strategies and tactics used here are as follows:

Content Optimization – This strategy involves changing the content of the website, particularly with it’s text elements. One way is to embed the researched keywords on texts found throughout the website, focusing mainly on the headers (those with the big bold letters). It is said that keywords used should be take about 7% of the total number of words in a content. Let’s say you have 400 words in a single page, so 7% of that 400 (which is 28) should be keywords. Note: Make sure that the content is still readable after placing those keywords. Remember that the users are still your prime target, not the search engine spiders. Site Map – Site maps are an important part of websites optimized for search engine. This way, search engine spiders (or robots) could easily crawl through the whole website by use of site map. Making it easier for spiders to crawl through the website is one way to make a website “search engine friendly”. Meta Tags - Meta tags are comprised of the Title, Description, and Keywords of the website. Other than the content of websites, meta tags are also the perfect place for keywords. The only difference is that these things are like a “Free Buffet” sign for search engine spiders, it’s the one responsible for attracting search engine spiders to crawl your website. But remember that it still depends on the structure of the meta tags. Alt Tags - Alt tags are those found in HTML image codes. Let’s say your keyword is “SEO Philippines“, your image tag should now look like this: <img src=”images.png” alt=“SEO Philippines”> Just like the meta tags, alt tags are also an appropriate place to put several important keywords. Note: Make sure that only one (1) keyword should be placed on every alt tags found all over the website to avoid keyword spamming (which is part of black hat SEO) Title Tags – Like meta tags and alt tags, title tags are also an appropriate place to put some keywords in. By adding a keyword, let’s take for example “SEO Service”, in the title tag, the HTML hyperlink tag should look like this: <a rel=”nofollow” onclick=”javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/outgoing/article_exit_link']);” href=”default.aspx” title=“SEO Service Online”> Note: Alt tags are not seen by visitors, only the search engine spiders so it wouldn’t hurt to just leave it with the keyword. But title tags are seen by visitors, so make sure that the title tag is still readable after embedding the a keyword or two.

Step 4: Start Off-Page SEO
Unlike the on-page, off-page optimization involves SEO strategies outside of the website. This part of SEO is divided into two categories, backlinks and public relation strategies. Backlinks are links all over the world wide web that points back to your website. It has long been considered that the many backlinks you have, the more popular you’ll get. Another theory added is the weight or importance of the website where the link is coming from. Tools used to determine the popularity of a website is through Google’s PageRank and Alexa traffic tool. Here are some of the strategies used by SEO specialists to get backlinks.

Link Exchange - One of the earliest forms of backlinking involves exchanging links with other relevant websites. Article Marketing - This type of off-page SEO can be considered both for backlinks and public relations. An article commonly generates an average of 3 links (depending on the kind of article directory it was submitted). It’s also considered as public relations because these articles commonly promotes the business they’re trying to market. Blog and Forum Commenting – Forums and blogs are also a popular trend to generate backlinks by using their signatures as links linking back to your website. Blogging - Other than commenting on other blogs, creating your own blog and embedding links is another popular way for generating backlinks.

PR or public relation strategies of off-page SEO involves generating traffic not only through search engines but also with other types of media. This type of off-page SEO mainly works by marketing their service through word of mouth. These strategies involves the use of:

Social Media - Social media such as Friendster, FaceBook, Twitter, and MySpace are the perfect place to start a buzz that could benefit the website through the marketing strategy they call “word of mouth”. Adding a link could also help in getting more backlinks. Social Bookmarking – By using the articles in bookmarking sites such as Technorati or Digg, people could easily learn about your services through your article. This is also another way for the articles to gain more importance in the web, thus increasing the chance for your websites to be visited through your articles.

Other forms of off-page SEO is submitting your website to search engine directories. Make sure to submit your URL for free to Google, Yahoo!, Alexa, www.altavista.com, www.alltheweb.com, www.excite.com, www.lycos.com, www.webcrawler.com, www.Jayde.com, www.whatuseek.com, and more. DMOZ and Yahoo Directory listings are tremendously valuable. There are a lot more free and paid search engines and directories to submit, but if you do not have time to search for and submit, you can also use our search engine submission service.Visit http://www.myoptimind.com for more information.

You probably are – and you don’t even know it.

Before we get into that, let’s quickly recap what has happened up until this point. It is relevant, I promise.

As the internet grows larger daily, and the number of searches online increase – we see people getting fanatical about getting their sites ranked. And why not? It’s a great, constant source of traffic leading targeted visitors to your door!

If only getting the results was easier!

I’m sure some of these statements will ring true for you.

* SEO is simple but not easy.

* SEO is time consuming and requires knowledge that only a small handful of business owners truly have, (since their real focus is and should be running their business) but is needed by everyone, not just a small handful.

* SEO is maddening but EFFECTIVE and NECESSARY.

So, what do you do when you know you need SEO, but you also know it is sometimes frustrating, it’s time consuming and it’s not your area of expertise? The consensus seems to be that you have 2 options:

1. Hire a professional SEO Firm. This frees up your time to run your business, and leaves it to the professionals who are equipped with the proper knowledge and time.

2. Learn SEO yourself, either through a current and up-to-date manual or some consulting.

Both scenarios have pros and cons. Whether you do it yourself or you hire an SEO Firm, you need to be 100% sure that the big picture is taken into consideration, and that you aren’t unintentionally sabotaging your own efforts.

Let’s look at SEO through the years, not in chronological order — just by highlighting a few key events.

Doorway pages were the biggest thing online – everyone used them, and they worked! Until Google caught on that people were just trying to trick them, and they banned the pages. Mouths dropped open in shock, as sites sitting pretty at the top of the SERPs (search engine results page) dropped from sight.

Reciprocal links were all the rage. Emails flew across the internet. You link to me, and I’ll link to you. Everyone was fast becoming friends and creating an information network that was all interlinked. Fabulous!

Until Google caught on that this isn’t a true representation of how popular your site is, people are just creating link farms and mass-generating “faux link popularity”. More mass droppage of sites from the SERPs.

One-way links are definitely the way to go. It’s exactly what Google wants, and if we simply buy a link from another website, Google will see it as a viable one-way link to my site. Who says you can’t buy love. I’ve got Google lovin’ me.

Until Google realizes there are sites with high PageRank out there, making a nice new monthly income for linking to sites that have not earned a link – and therefore the faux link popularity issue is just perpetuated.

With all of the link confusion, it is a constant source for debate: reciprocal is OK, as long as it is relevant and from a high PR site. One way is the only way to go, but only if it is relevant and from a high PR site. What is high PR anyway, is it anything above 3 or 4 or 5?

With all the questions flying, attention seemed to go back to a new and improved type of doorway page. One that includes links to other sites (resources) underneath text for your site.

This is truly great – this technique is actually legit, you are providing a real value to people by having helpful links on your site, and the search engines just happen to view those links with text as keyword rich, so they boost your rankings.

A very legitimate tactic, it made sense to the engines, and it was fairly easy to do. Great – we’ve finally found a way to create some great pages that Google seems to like. Everyone is sitting pretty now.

Until Google sees the internet infiltrated with sites that are nothing but mass-produced pages with no customization. Resource pages spit out by software, with no real content to support it. That ended the “resource page hay day”.

Blogs are “it”. Everyone can create a free blog, and then blog and ping like crazy. It drives the spiders to your blog when you ping, they follow links in your posts to your main site, and next thing you know you can control Googlebot, and Yahoo Slurp. With a few good posts, you can plan on the bots swinging by to pick up more pages in your site. Cool, things are happening now! Until Google realizes people have programs doing auto-posts and auto-pings and it’s not the most relevant or original content. Google wises up, and for those still trying to get away with automated blogging and pinging, you’re wasting your time.

The link debates rage on; content is still king; and people want rankings more than ever. What’s next?

1. RSS Feed – for a long time no one knew what it stood for, but they all love it. You can create content and send it out to the world to read with their preferred viewer. That truly is an opportunity to get your message out there!

You can also pull feeds into your site to bulk up content. Amazing. What an opportunity.

2. Enter the Press Release and Article Syndication. Brand spanking new and dressed to impress. It was fabulous – write informative articles and submit them around the internet – the benefit is two-fold – each article will drive traffic to your site, and the links within the article will count as links for your site!

The Press Release was killer too. Write an informative, keyword rich press release and get it sent out to thousands of media outlets online. You could count on about 30 days worth of traffic enjoyment from one release. Not to mentioned, press releases get picked up in the News engines and the regular engines too.

Great – so what’s the problem?

Too many people don’t look at the big picture, and the actual reason behind algorithm shifts. People don’t learn from them, they simply adjust their methods and move on until the next algo shift.

If you really look at the trends, and realize what Google wants and why they do what they do, I think you’ll find a very common theme.

Google wants to deliver relevant results to people. They have no hidden agenda. They simply want to deliver the best and most relevant results in response to someone’s search query.

That alone tells us all we need to know. In order to get good rankings, we need a popular site with great, informative content that is current.

Any current hot technique is only a fad. We make sure of that. What do I mean by that? Stay tuned for Part 2 of “Are You Sabotaging Your SEO Success?”

Getting an advantage in the competitive online marketplace can be quite challenging. Once online marketers start to see some success, some have a tendency to put their head down and focus solely on the business at hand. This can lead to missing some of the other opportunities to gain business, like using SEO.

The top webmasters have an understanding of SEO and how it affects their sites. There are many myths about SEO and what it is, but even if you have never heard the term it can be easy to apply and benefit from SEO.

SEO is the process of optimizing your website from a technical and stylistic viewpoint. The technical optimization takes the form of using the proper Meta Tags, Alt Image Tags, and off-page optimization techniques. The stylistic adjustments are made in order to make the content more search engine friendly such as keyword density, bold text, title text, headings and other ways to highlight the most important keywords on your site, so the search engines can deliver accurate results to users.

The natural outcome of optimizing a site is increased traffic from search engines, and ranking higher in the results that are delivered to their users.

SEO won’t necessarily change the look of your site. Although, sometimes it is a good idea to make structural changes to a site to make it easier for the search engine to read the page. Many times some subtle changes in your headings, focusing on your keywords in text, adding content can make a big difference in your overall SEO.

Depending on how competitive your chosen keywords are, you can expect to see results from your SEO efforts fairly quickly, sometimes in just a few days. To start your SEO effort, however, use broader, less competitive keywords and work your way up to the more competitive ones. This way you can get the momentum going and gain PageRank to compete in the more competitive terms as you move up in the search results.

Tracking your website statistics is the best way to track your SEO and know if your SEO efforts are bringing the desired results. Basic statistics are included in most hosting packages, or you can check out GoogleAnalytics.

Pay attention to the source of your traffic as you analyze the data. When you start to see increasing referrals from the major search engines you know you efforts are working. Then, watch where your traffic is coming from on a geographic area. If you only ship to The US, you wouldn’t want to attract visitors from Australia. If you sell globally, then you will be able to determine where you product is hot.

If you are using other advertising methods like pay per click, or Banner Ads, direct them to special landing pages so you don’t skew your results with traffic from paid advertising.

SEO is far and away the best way to attract free, highly targeted traffic to your site. SEO can easily be incorporated into your advertising and marketing efforts, and the increase in traffic, and ultimately sales will make the effort well worth the time.

As SEO continues to be concern number one for all website owners, more and more individuals are turning to outsourcing companies to work on their website’s SEO and pagerank. In dealing with these companies, many people are still confused about what it is exactly they must do. Sometimes the answers to your questions conflict with other SEO firms or what you read in an article last month, or what some friend’s little brother did on his site that made him rich overnight (don’t laugh, I have heard those stories many times.)

I’m here to hopefully answer SEO outsource questions and help you get your site pulling in the traffic you’d like to see. Remember, traffic is the lifeblood of your website, and SEO is one of the best traffic generation techniques you can employ. Let’s get to work.

There is a study recently completed on the results of companies outsourcing SEO (Sept. 2005, Jupiter). The results may appear shocking, but it is something I see every day in this business.

The study showed that 64% of companies that chose to outsource their SEO work did NOT follow the instructions their SEO firm laid out for them! Let me repeat- they did not follow instructions! Even though this company recognized the importance of traffic (good), researched and selected an SEO firm (better), and laid down the cash (lots of it for a professional and effective outfit, even better), their not following directions let it all fall apart!

Imagine. If 64% of those who contracted SEO work don’t get it, how easy would it be for you to get ahead and optimize your website- the more attention you pay to detail, the more SEO, the more SEO, the more traffic you get, and the more traffic, the happier you are, invariably.

The more SEO changes, the more its principles stay the same. The SEO winners are not those individuals who chase each new trend. The winners are those who commit to their SEO firm and treat their business with the seriousness success commands.

So, now that you have an SEO firm working your website into search engine page-ranking super-being, your job is to sit back, implement the pertinent adjustments, and wait for the results. Carefully shaping the firm’s suggestions into the working fiber of your website is critical, as these changes are those that will drive your site up. Forget Desperate Housewives- try desperate SEO firms. With 64% of clients NOT making the moves necessary for success, no wonder there are rumors of astounding failure with SEO firms out there.

Now that you are part of the 36% that takes action, its time to treat your website with the seriousness and commitment it deserves. Then, get to work with the right SEO company to open the floodgates of traffic SEO can deliver. Internet marketing success is simple, not easy, and its your choice.

How important is SEO? Well! For starters, it can help you achieve high online visibility. Of course, this is not going to happen overnight just like “Rome was not built in a day”. So if you have a small business or a start-up company with a small online advertising budget then SEO is the best option you have. So where do you really begin? Depending on what your requirement is, you will need the services of SEO experts to guide you through the entire process so that you can manage your business and they can manage your website SEO.

There are hundreds and thousands of so-called SEO consultants but only a few are professional, reliable and experienced. Find the crème of SEO Experts can be a difficult job but here are some tips that will make your work easier:

Don’t fall for the tall SEO promises

There are several SEO consultants who make tall claims about their level of expertise. Some of them even claim that they have got websites number one ranking in the top search engines like Google or Yahoo within a few days. One of the favorite lines is, “I can get your articles submitted to hundreds of directories and it will make a major impact”. The truth is that firstly, no expert in SEO or SEM can ever guarantee number one ranking on any of the top search engines for a particular or set of popular keyword phrases, and absolutely nobody can guarantee this within a few days (unless this is a pay per click campaign). Secondly, there are only a few authentic and relevant submission directories over the internet where you can submit your content to enhance back-linking. The thought of the day is, “Don’t go for the promises, go for the facts!” You need a talented SEO firm to seek out quality links for you efficiently.

Website ranking of the SEO expert

SEO expert’s website is the first place you need to visit if you are planning an internet marketing campaign. All top SEO experts will have their own website with details regarding the services offered by them, their portfolio, client feedbacks, and a contact us page. The best way to check the authenticity and expertise of SEO consultants is by checking the ranking of their website. If their website is at the bottom of Google PageRank then they are probably not good enough and will not be able to offer positive assistance for your SEO campaign. Another important thing you need to check is if their website has been blacklisted by search engines like Google. There are many SEO specialists who have been blacklisted because they have used black hat SEO tactics and spamming for increasing web popularity and page ranking.

Reputation of SEO Consultant

There is a saying that “reputation always precedes the person.” In this case, you will need to ask the SEO consultants for client reference as well as read through any testimonials published on their website. You need to check the website of their clients and check their ranking on different search engines and over the internet. Most top SEO Experts will have no issues sharing their references.

Once you are satisfied with the response and the website, you can initiate the process of hiring an expert.