techtrends@works

Snapshots for your Site

2007-04-16T18:48:00.001-07:00

Do you want instant preview on a particular link you have created on you site?

Snap Shots™ is the most used feature you can acquire for free and integrate it to your site and personal blogs. It is an open, extensible platform for creating, sharing, and distributing contextually relevant content.

Currently, they have another custom shots available for use. They have the Reuters' global news capabilities preview that gives a Snap Shots of story headlines for publicly-traded companies. The Company News, updated in real time, is contained within a Snap Shot and is linked to the actual Reuters articles.

Snap Shots works exactly like Snap Preview Anywhere-you don't even have to update your javascript. Then when you link to certain approved URLs and then it automatically triggers the appropriate Snap Shot.

Give it a try now and you'll see the difference..

technorati tags:snap, shots, instant, preview

Blogged with Flock

How Blogs Makes a Good SEO Strategy

2007-02-20T22:36:00.000-08:00

Blogs are a great way to get started authoring content and sharing your knowledge and insights with other people. Plus, mix work and play - and you can get rich doing this.

You don't have to be an MBA-accredited author by any means. However, there are some rules to play by, and I'll break those out below. We will talk about the top blogs, practicalities around blogs and creative ways to get started, including how you could possibly ruin your good-standing ranking and having to change your Search Engine Optimization strategy.

Blogs - Structure and Layout

I work in the field of Search Engine Optimization. It has a wide range of options, from the technical to the more strategic. Tons of discussions are found on off-page and on-page factors, latent semantic analysis, content scope, quality, HTML/CSS development, site navigational structure, spamdexing, 301 redirects, plagiarism, link strategies, directories, blogs, search engine news, email marketing tips & online (internet) marketing. Most all of the top 10 SEO firms out there agree that blogs are a "must" for driving traffíc and to get established in the Internet community.

There is a right way, and a wrong way. We'll discuss these below.

Be warned - too many folks out there are thinking about "how to outbeat the search engines" and use the latest-and-greatest (blogs) to elevate their rankings, essentially via content and blog sp@m. Blogs are a powerful way to get seen by the search bots. Blogger (Google's own) is an important key to the puzzle, but there are many.

The Un-Official Top 7 Blogging Best Practices For SEO

Start here, begin a quick review of the world's top blogs:

http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs - updated daily

http://www.problogger.net - he makes #16,000/month

http://microsaw.stikipad.com - web 2.0 blogs

Get an account - it's free. Log in - and - don't start! What? No, you must first continue by scanning the list above and get a sense for what people are writing about. This could be more generic at first, but start looking to yourself. What do you know? What do people come to you for? Anything that you specialize in? (Hint: don't think "how can I sell this" - but "how can I share this?") You'll also learn how to use trackback functions to allow other people to be notified. Permalinks are great for SEO and should be used where appropriate. So, now you learned something big: be yourself!

Think about an interesting headline. You don't need to be a copywriter, but you should think about your headline and the topic at hand. More importantly, is it something that you are passionate about, or can contribute something to? It's ok to spend some time here, writer's block can come up. Think about other sites, can you re-write their UVP (unique value proposition)? How would you write yours (thinking theme here). What I've found to work is simply sit back and start talking as if you were discussing a (hot) topic with a friend, and then break it out into sub-groups from there.

Writing tips: casual, friendly and interesting (meaning you have something to write and you don't copy others) works well in blogs. Make sure you stay on topic and that you are truthful. Would you lie to your mother? Of course not - then think about this when you are writing online (and she will not come after you). Yahoo's blogging policy is a good one: "Be respectful of your colleagues, get your facts straight, provide context to your argument, and engage in private feedback." Also, make sure to include images (flickr) and video (youtube, google video) where you can. Make the images rich and colorful, don't worry about sizing too much.

Committment, persistence and discipline. Sound like an extract from Jim Rohn or Anthony Robbins? Well, they probably are - but it applies to most of the things you do in life. So be it with blogging. Carve out 1/2-1 hour every day to nurture your blog business. Think of it as your morning ritual - right after you have attended to your family and other duties. Plus, often you are not going to be in writing mode - but rather, maintenance mode - reviewing and responding to other blogger's input.

Search engines start picking up your blog, and traffíc increases. Be prepared and if it gets out of hand, be able to manage that too. I'm not simply talking about traffíc, but as others join and comment, you may need to defend your stance, including admitting mistakes if / when you make them. Folks appreciate other folks who are big enough to admit mistakes if it gets there. For example, you may have folks who don't like you - even if you're Bill Gates. This guy created a Corporate Weblog Manifesto that I found interesting.

Run and host your own blog service. More expensive, but this could have a large impact on your ability to control not only the content, but custom HTML layouts, code and information architecture that are important to search engines. You can offer this as a service to others in your niche market. BusinessLogs.com is a great resource to use for starting this process, and more hands-on development companies like LevelTenDesign.com can be an option for you. Keep in mind that the market has developed niche-companies, from real-estate to healthcare, and you should research those specifically.

Content is important for Search Engine Optimization - be on top of it, keep a schedule.

Voila - that's it, there you have it. Watch how the search engines will start picking up your content. You can run tools to see how you are ranking, how often you are showing up in the search engines. We like UrlTrends.com as a simple beginner starting point. However, it's not 100% accurate, other SEO tools can provide more detail.

Keep your content fresh, updates daily is preferred - and definitely once a week and your search engine marketing (which includes search engine optimization) will become more visible than it was just last week. Then, use Pingomatic.com to alert search engines that you have made updates. It's a frëe service, and will help your visibility.

Open Source Initiative

2007-01-12T17:29:00.000-08:00

More webwasters are now adapting the so called "open source softwares" and continue to adapt and advocate for a free participative content development. So, what is really an open source. As defined by its attached license in every software being distributed to the public for further development use, modify, and redistribute the software.

Open Source is a certification mark owned by the Open Source Initiative. Developers of software that is intended to be freely shared and possibly improved and redistributed by others can use the Open Source trademark if their distribution terms conform to the OSI's Open Source Definition.

To summarize, the Definition model of distribution terms require that:

* Free Redistribution
No restrictions are placed on parties from selling of giving away the software.

* Source Code Availability
The software must include source code and must also allow for binary distributions when there is a well-publicized means of obtaining the source code.

* Derived Works
Modifications and derived works must be allowed, and must be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

* Integrity of the Authors Source Code
The distribution of modified source code must be allowed although restrictions to ensure the possibility to distinguish the original source code from the derived works are tolerated. For example, the possibility of using different software names.

* No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.

* No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.

* Distribution of License
The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

* License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
The rights given by the license must not be different for the original distribution and any other one even when it takes place in a totally different context.

* License Must Not Contaminate Other Software
The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.

AJAX can be a Search Engine Friendly?

2006-12-01T18:28:00.000-08:00

AJAX is becoming the standard for Web 2.0 and lots of web developers are including myself had jump to its bandwagon. AJAX is very technical in nature and can only be performed by a technically skilled JAVA and XML developers. What is strange is, AJAX has been available to developers for over 5 years and it was only simplified the re-branding of this technology and it cause the rise in the popularity and become the current "buzzword" to all webmasters.

One of the developers concern is its searchability on the web. This is an important area that we should consider in web development stage. This area is called Search Engine Optimization.
So how well the Web 2.0 websites performs on search engines? Do we have to allow search engines to cope up with the fast pace of web development? We'll, we have to be aware of that.

One of the advantage of using AJAX to the site is it removes the need to refresh a page in a browser. Without refreshing the page, the asynchronous JavaScript runs off, grabs the pages for a certain are or give the results of the search in an instant in the very same page. It allows an intuitive users experience but these are not their concern. We, as developers, always think from the behind of the technology on how it works on some are that would affect the functionality of the site.

According to the blog I read from Ashok Sudani (http://search.sys-con.com/read/305982.htm) "He said that Search Engines don't run JavaScript because areas of it are now hidden to search engines, and can never be spidered, indexed, or found. AJAX, in short, has its limitations. He wants developers t drop AJAX and let the user suffers the page refresh instead. But this is not the case we should think for our users.

We are here to provide ease of use for our users and we should listen to what they say. That's the concept of Web 2.0 that he missed to mention in his narrative. The new standard let the user interfere within the site and let them use it as if its theirs.

Now, how AJAX became friendly to us developers? Its good to know that technical team of BoonEx gives a positive way to address the issue. We all wanted both AJAX and search engines to stay alive and happy.

They have developed a product line that will address existing "drawbacks" that can integrate AJAX as the extremely popular language in web development.

This is not promote their product, but its a promising tool that webmaster like me would like to try out. BoonEx is a company that provides community tools for site such as Wki, Blogs and Forum. Aside from that some of its product are free that anyone can test or try and inviting all developers to participate.

And to share their information on how AJAX can help webmasters develop SE-friendly AJAX apps, they have webmasters develop 2 versions of their websites - for users and for search engines. They have combined both into one. Literally. They use XSL transformation for generating site contents. XSL transformation can be done on the client side (in browser) and/or on the server side (in php). This effectively removes the need to write different code for AJAX and for search engines. The same code provides different functionality for search engines and for users. Know more about this story

Understanding SEO

2006-11-18T21:59:00.000-08:00

Search Engine Optimization(SEO)process is a powerful strategy used by webmasters to maximize its potential in page ranking under the major search engines today such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. This effort was necessary for sites visibility to increase its marketing value in the end. But how really SEO and search algorithm works and how it manipulates the sites' popularity. Here's a bit of discussion from the pinoy SEO group.

Different Search Engine Means Different Algorithm

All search engines have their own algorithms to determine the value and, therefore, positioning of websites. While the majority of SEO work tends to concentrate on Google because of the sheer weight of searches they receive it would be foolish to discount or ignore the other major search engines. Yahoo is considered one of the big three along with Google and MSN and by concentrating a little more time and effort on Yahoo optimization it is quite possible to gain a good amount of traffic. With ultra competitive keywords it may actually provide an easier way to generate search traffic than gearing all your efforts solely towards Google.

The Most Important Yahoo Optimization Factor

The first, and most pertinent point is that Yahoo judges content to be the most important factor in their algorithms. They do still consider inbound links and other factors but they are attuned to the way of the content site and they love sites that provide keyword-optimized content in large mass. While that may make it sound easier than concentrating on generating a huge base of inbound links as you would for Google, Yahoo optimization presents its own challenges and its own unique quirks that you should consider.

Looking At Keyword Density

Because of the relevance that Yahoo places on the content within your site, the keyword once again becomes a vitally important aspect of your research. While Google have been striving to promote sites that use organic content and webmasters and SEOs have been optimizing with around 2% to 3% keyword density Yahoo prefers a much greater density level. The danger, of course, is that giving Yahoo what they want may cause Google to deem your content as being keyword stuffed but there is another difference between the two algorithms that can help to counteract this problem.

Using Stems, Inflexions, And Variants Of Keywords

Yahoo is very heavily language based. This means that it is, strictly speaking, more aware of the nuances of the written language. It will include synonyms and inflexions of a keyword when considering your keyword density; something that Google does not consider to the same extent. This means that it is possible to optimize for both without diminishing your ranking with one another.

How To Optimize For Yahoo Without Getting Penalized By Google

Google likes a density of around 2% and Yahoo likes a density as high as 7% or even 8%. This means that you can effectively use 4 variations of a single keyword or phrase and a density of 2% for each. This offers further advantages. With Google you are now gearing your content towards four different keywords and offering the level they want, and you are still providing Yahoo with the much higher density rate that they require. Because you can include plurals and further stems of keywords this means you can write in a much more natural tone.

Using The Near Forgotten Meta Tags

One area that a lot of SEO professionals and webmasters alike now tend to overlook is the Meta tag. However, Yahoo appears to still give consideration to the keyword and description tags in particular. This is quite rare in the case of most search engines and Google certainly do not look for keywords in your Meta tags. Do not attempt to dupe Yahoo, though, and only include keywords that genuinely appear on your page and are relevant to your topic.

Regular, Fresh Content Is King

You’ve probably heard the saying that “content is king” and this is even truer when considering Yahoo optimization. The more content you provide the better. This may mean making regular additions to your site but it will generate the kind of results you are looking for. Blogs are also a very good way to continue adding relevant content to your site that Yahoo will smile down on.

The Lazy Yahoo Bot

Compared to other search engine spiders the Yahoo bot is a comparatively lazy animal. It doesn’t crawl as often as other bots and it certainly doesn’t crawl as deep into your site to find all of your pages and index them. This means you should pay extra attention to creating a legible sitemap and keeping it updated as regularly as possible. Yahoo has a sitemap submission feature that is similar to Google’s and using this is heavily recommended to try and ensure that Yahoo stays on top of the infrastructure of your site and ranks you accordingly.

Inbound Links And Controlling Them Yourself

Inbound links are still important to Yahoo, but again a lot of emphasis is placed on content. Textual relevance seems to be one of the most important factors so having control over your inbound links and being able to determine the pages where they appear and the anchor text of each is important. Perhaps the best way to generate inbound links for Yahoo optimization is to use the article directories to your benefit.

Yahoo Optimization Conclusion

Google may be the search engine that everyone talks about and optimizes for but ignoring Yahoo would be foolish. This is especially true because while the Yahoo algorithm is quite different to the Google one and other algorithms, it is still quite easy to optimize for both. The most important factors to remember are to use relevant Meta tags for every single page of your site, include as much content and update your site with new content as often as possible, and update a sitemap both on your website and with the Yahoo sitemaps function.

How to gain a good page ranking on the major search engines
Well I guess nobody - even SEO experts - can say or demonstrate the exact search engine algorithm. This article, at least will give us hints on how we can rank well in search engines like what we're doing in this ituloy angsulong seo contest.

Here it goes:

What is the secret for gaining a high page ranking in the major search engines? In essence, it's nothing more complicated than doing what the search engines want you to do. In other words, it's making things easy for the robots when they come crawling around your site.

Let's talk first principles.

One.
The search engines don't operate for the benefit of webmasters. Their main function is to provide good information to the public at large. This means that any website you submit to them must reach their 'good content' criteria. Therefore, to achieve a high ranking, it is imperative that your website has better, more illuminating content than your competitors.

Two.
Search engine robots are pretty rigid in their approach to sites. The robot crawls your HTML from top to bottom. Given this, it is important that the first stick of body copy it comes across (the stuff your readers also see) contains copy which is relevant to, and reflects: (a) the Title of your web page and, (b) the meta keywords and meta description phrases contained in the "Head-tag" of your HTML.

To put it simply, the first few lines of copy will often be grabbed by the bots and used as a description of your site in their listing. So, if this copy says nothing in particular about your products or services, then you'll be banished to page 97.

Three.
Some webmasters are obsessed by keywords. They drive themselves nuts attempting to coin exactly the right set of words with which to describe their site. This approach is essentially flawed. It's not keywords you want, but key phrases.

Allow me to explain. Let's say that you are in the market for a good book on copywriting. You open Google search and you type in....what? Copywriting? Not really, because that will result in approximately one-and-a-half million entries from copywriters looking for work. Thus, the obvious thing is to type the phrase Books on Copywriting, which will cut the list to about half. But this list will largely be relevant to what you are looking for.http://www.transformers-movies.com/

Research shows that people generally use phrases in their search requests - they rarely employ a single word. It makes sense, then, to populate your meta keywords with phrases you feel people will employ in their search for products or services.

And the easiest way to figure out what key phrases are optimal for your products, is to ask yourself what phrases people would use to find you, then try them out on the search engines.

One other point worth mentioning about keywords and phrases is that some search engines - Google, for instance - no longer take them into account at all! On the other hand, many others do. So it is generally better to incorporate them.

Four.
The "title tag" in your website HTML is the phrase you choose to name your site. The general rule in framing your title is: 'what's right for people is generally wrong for search engines'. Essentially, you should try to incorporate your major key phrases into the "title tag". Just make a list of them and try to incorporate them in the title.

The fact is it really doesn't matter whether your site title is a million miles away from your own name, or the actual name of your business. It's simply a device for gaining the attention of the bots.

A title tag can contain up to twenty words; but more doesn't mean better. Eight to twelve well chosen words is more than sufficient. For best results, the first (short) phrase of the title tag should be geared towards the human reader, while the remainder can be key words aimed at the bot. Bear in mind that the search engine will display only the first few words of the title tag anyway (whatever suits their house-style).

Five.
It's a terrible old cliche, but with robots, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. As mentioned above, the crawler will grab the first thing it comes across and then use it to describe your site. Good enough reason to make the very first paragraph on your site as key-phrase rich as you can. Indeed, the first para should recap and enlarge upon all the material in your title and meta tags.

All right, this first paragraph also has to be read by your visitors, so it has to make sense. Writing this para so that it is acceptable to both robot and human is an art in itself. But perseverance can pay large dividends insofar as search engine placement is concerned.

In addition, your opening para should be designated by an H1 paragraph tag so that its importance is obvious to the bot. If you hand-flog your HTML, just drop in "H1-tag" and "H1 end-tag" at front and back of the paragraph.

Six.
Now a word or two about how often you should post your site to search engines. Some authorities believe that if you post too often, your efforts may be seen as spam by the engines and you'll be banned. On the other hand, it seems to be the consensus that you should post every time you make changes to pages or add pages.

Generally speaking, whenever you tweak your site - particularly the index page, you should post straight away. The search engines seem to like changes and they react accordingly by shoving you farther to the front of the listings. The more you do, the better they like it.

If all of this leaves you somewhat cold, not to mention baffled, you may be wiser to employ a professional Search Engine Optimizer. Somebody who knows what they are doing. The modest cost could save you a lot of heartache.

And that's that. If this has been useful, maybe you'll let me know. But if it seems that I've been teaching you to suck eggs, perhaps you'll let me know that also.

Why Bother With SEO For MSN?
One of the most common preconceptions with SEO is that if you optimize a site for the benefit of Google then you will rank well with other search engines. However, the big three search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) all use different algorithms that demand different things. Google has a mixed bag but certainly leans towards inbound links whereas Yahoo loves keyword dense content sites. This leaves us with MSN, whose primary consideration when determining their search results seems to be heavily based on internal linking structure and inbound links. But these are far from the only SEO techniques you need to consider.

MSN The Meta Search Engine

MSN Search is a meta search engine. Whereas Google openly ignores your meta tags in the majority of cases MSN blatantly uses them to index your pages and discover your keywords. At the very least you need to include the “keywords”, “description”, and “title” meta tags. Your main keywords should be included in all of these with your primary keyword appearing first in the “keywords” meta tag. All tags must include the keywords you consider the most important to your site.

Also, because MSN uses the meta tags, you should be careful not to spam them with numerous instances of your keyword or the use of incorrect or inaccurate keywords. At present, meta spamming doesn’t seem to be an issue with the MSNbot but it is only a matter of time and when the change occurs you won’t receive any warning before your site is penalized.

Page Layout And Code

The coding of a page is always an issue with search engines and, therefore, should be important to you as well. If a crawler can’t crawl your site then you are unlikely to be indexed and you certainly won’t receive the high ranking you want. Keep the amount of HTML or any other programming language on your page down to an absolute minimum and ensure that page sizes are below 150KB at the very most.

Another slightly contentious issue is the use of tables. Again, this leads us back to a crawling problem. MSN does not condemn the use of tables on the whole. However, the MSNbot does not like to see tables within tables within tables. This can be a problem if you don’t use CSS and rely on tables to keep your page neat. Including another table in the layout of your page begins to make things look messy from the point of view of the MSNbot.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an area of SEO that always causes arguments. No search engine openly publishes their requirements in this area but it is widely accepted that while Google has stringent rules in place that require minimal use of keywords both Yahoo and MSN have a much greater tolerance for higher levels. Google prefers only a 2% to 3% density while MSN and Yahoo allow 5% to 6%, possibly even a little higher.

Of course this raises the problem that optimizing for MSN may have you flagged as spam with Google. Fortunately, MSN and Yahoo, both take keyword stemming and keyword variants into account when doing their calculations. Use keyword plurals and stems, and try to ensure that you don’t go above the Google ideal of 2% for each of these variants. Also, it is absolutely imperative that your SEO writing does not prevent you from writing copy that is appealing to human visitors.

Website Infrastructure And SEO

Your website infrastructure is important to MSN. Many sites, my own included, have shown excellent results in MSN based on the internal text links and associated anchor text. Try to use the primary keyword for a page as its title and ensure that you use this keyword in all of your navigation bars on your site. This will have a very positive influence on the MSNbot.

Also, as with all search engines, MSN wants to be able to reach every page of your site quickly and easily. Text links are best for navigation and all pages should be reached within three clicks from your home page. If you use graphical navigation bars then you should consider either changing them to text links or including a sitemap that is one click away from your homepage.

Inbound Link Importance

Inbound links count as votes for your website. The more votes you get from sites the better, but moreover the more influential the sites that provide a link to you the greater your search engine results. In all honesty, MSN currently appear to favor the quantity of links over the quality but search engine algorithms are renowned for evolving so try to plan ahead and get relevant links from popular pages. The most important aspect of any individual inbound link is the anchor text. You must get webmasters to use your primary keyword for the page that the link points to as the anchor text.

MSN SEO Conclusion

MSN Search is gaining a little ground on its major competitor, Google. Microsoft is unlikely to sit back and be happy with only taking a small share of the market so optimizing for MSN in order to ensure that you get beneficial results from their search engine is a very good idea. It is possible to optimize pages and content for all of the major search engines if done properly and carefully.

Google Ranks as the 3rd Largest Technology Company in the World

2006-11-07T22:15:00.000-08:00

This is not really a surprising headline for all of us. But in the Techworld, it's transparent that Google is taking the front seat for global net control. The Raw Story had detailed how Google had surpassed IBM as the third largest technology company in the world worth a whopping $145 billion. Compare that to IBM's $139.5 billion valuation and you can see that they have a good lead on them and are now biting at the heels of Cisco and Microsoft who still holds the #1 spot.

Here's the breakdown figures found in that article (in billions).

ExxonMobil - $416
General Electric - $367
Microsoft - $279
Wal-Mart - $214
Cisco - $147.5
Google - $145
IBM - $139.5
Intel - $123
Hewlett-Packard - $109
DaimlerChrysler - $54
eBay - $ 45
Yahoo - $32
Amazon - $14
General Motors - $20
Ford - $15

With the phenomenal growth of Google, an internet advertising giant who's search engine started in 1998, had been a much talked subject in technology trends today. Just this year, it continues to buy companies that are deterrent to their business. This phenomena is a clear fact that many of the other companies on the list above have been around for years and/or have a variety of revenue streams and with the entry of Google in the global scene is short of exhilarating to be part of this exciting time in history and watch them continue to grow into this mammoth entity.

Today, Google is worth some 58 billion dollars more than the combined value of America's three largest automakers DaimlerChrysler (54 billion dollars), General Motors (20 billion dollars) and Ford (15 billion dollars).

Online Marketing Strategy

2006-10-20T22:00:00.000-07:00

Marketing a site is another headache for a webmaster. Strategies should be studied and proposed within the respective organization and ask how they can benefit from it. Well, here the survey:

Search engines, directories and online communities attract over 90 percent of the Web population or one out of every three Americans as indicated by Nielsen/NetRatings Internet Statistics. Other studies show that approximately 85% of initial web site visits originate from search engine referrals. This clearly indicates that search engine marketing is no longer a luxury but rather an absolute necessity for online success.

Finally, It's a Google-YouTube Tandem

2006-10-19T07:56:00.000-07:00

After the rumors slipped from an insider that Google is planning to acquire the world's number one online video sharing site-You Tube, finally, Google paid $1.65 billion in all stock acquisition. This is another wise maneuvering of this search giant to position itself as the leading "killer" apps on the web.

The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful and that's the reason why it makes the urgent move to save its falling video business. And with this new acquitition, its just show that Google maintains us the king of the web and monopolizes the avenue of today's internet users.

YouTube as report says will continue to be based in San Bruno, CA, and all YouTube employees will remain with the company. With Google's technology, advertiser relationships and global reach, YouTube will continue to build on its success as one of the world's most popular services for video entertainment.

As of press time..Google continues to buy out other technology companies...

About Google Inc.
Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit www.google.com.

About YouTube
Founded in February 2005, YouTube is a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. YouTube allows people to easily upload and share video clips on www.YouTube.com and across the Internet through websites, blogs, and e-mail. YouTube currently delivers more than 100 million video views every day with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily and it has quickly become the leading destination on the Internet for video entertainment.

Guide to Search Engine Optimization

2006-10-01T21:08:00.000-07:00

I found this site of Jim Westergren. I found it very informative in a sense that some of his writings became one of my guide on the present web development project I have for Filipiniana.net. I have read his post from a discussion forum of Digital Point. Some part of it are not applicable, still I found it very informative source for techies like me.

This 24 year old SEO expert had nearly won the biggest SEO competition by V7 Network
and his writings on the subject has been recognized and been recommended by many international industry leaders in the field of Search Engine Optimization. Same pattern also was replicated by a Filipino community with the launch of Isulong SEOPH which offers PHP130,000 Contest price for putting its keyword in the number one slot rank in google .

Keyword Research

Work out the best keywords to target based on relevance and KEI for each webpage on the site (or as many as possible).
Limit the KWs to target of each page to 1 or 2 one phrase.
To keep track of which keywords the pages has to target put them in the Meta KW tag, a very good tag to keep track of this, hehe.

On-Page Optimization

Domain name: Get the most important KW in the domain name. Don’t make it look spammy, if the visitor feels it spammy, Google for sure also thinks so.
Title: Try to make variations of the KW. Don’t repeat the same word more than 2 times and not after each other. Keep company name in the end of the title if branding is needed.
Internal navigation: Each web page HAS to be reachable within two clicks (if not a site based on a db). If not with navigation structure then with a sitemap. Isolate if any webpages are more important than others and if so, get more links to it. For example if the homepage is very important make a link to it from each page - both for the visitors and for the SEs. Avoid navigation with flash or some complex js - but if you HAVE to keep it then have a normal HTML navigation on the bottom of the page.
Use H1 and H2 tags with KWs in them and define them in the CSS file. Use the headings in a sensible and logical way to avoid possible filters.
Meta desc: KW in the beginning, action for the visitor in the end.
KW rich text starts early in the source: Use CSS-P for this and get the CSS and JS in external files.
Page contains a lot of text: You should strive for to keep your web pages at least 250 words each.
Use the Title attribute in the anchor tags.
Use ALT description tags on the images.
Use the strong tag if possible to emphasize KWs.
Spread out the KWs in the body text. Avoid a too high density, if it feels a bit spammy, reduce it. You write for the visitors not the SEs.
In case you have any tables use the summary attribute.
Use XHTML and put all design in the external CSS file to reduce the file sizes and make it “easier” for the spiders to see the content.
Avoid frames and flash based site.
Avoid poison words in the title, headings, file name and other important places.
Use static URLs. If you use a db get it mod_rewritten.
Use dashes in the URLs. Confirmed by my own SEO test as well as on the Google blog by GG as well as Matt Cutts.
Keep your files under 100K. (spiders may disregard additional)
If needed break up words in the source so they form keywords by using “word-spacing:-4px” with CSS.
Have your content change/updated on a regular basis so the spiders will come more often. If this is not done manually you can rotate/randomize text with PHP. This maybe also will rank you higher.
Avoid ANY kind of bad hat SEO or anything could mistakenly be seen as bad hat. This includes doorways, non-301 redirects, hidden texts or links, spamming, mirror domains, cloaking etc.
Validate the code by W3C so you make it easier for the SE spiders.
Never link to any site that could be seen as a bad site.
Use 301 to get the PR on one version of the domain name (confirmed by GG on WMW and by Matt Cutts on his blog)
If you have any link to an unimportant page let say copyright terms on each page use the rel=nofollow so that you distribute the PR more to your other pages than that one.

Off-Page Optimization

Get links from high PR pages to your site. Try to have them related in the same theme. Avoid excessive reciprocal linking, it could be penalized - three way linking is better.
Avoid temporary links to your site, the older they are the better.
Get your KWs in the anchor text of the links to your site.
Avoid excessive crosslinking.
Whenever you feel that “now I have enough links”, set a new goal to double them.
Good ways to get links: Write and submit high quality articles to article sites, write something unique and useful, get into niche directories (also general once are ok.) But avoid the FFA type in which there is no approval.
Make a Google sitemap and submit it.
Get a reliable host that has more than 99% uptime, is fast and is not hosting bad sites (you don’t want to be in a bad neighbourhood.)
Submit your site to SEs and directories ONLY manually.

Factors in the Long Run

Content is not King. UNIQUE content is King. Huge difference. Write something valuable that has not been written before and you will see what I mean.
Add more unique content on a regular basis. Try to write at least an article or web page with text per week.
Build your web site big. One big good one is much better than 10 small not-so-good ones.
Have good statistics and analyze from where you get your visitors, their paths on your site and finetune it.
Observe: Look and observe all the time. Check the SERPs, check the stats, check this, check that and learn. If something goes good reinforce it, if something was not good remedy it.

Personal Recommendations

If you have a site about information try to specialize it in a certain niche.
Make a SEO friendly directory in your niche of speciality. You will get a huge benefit of this. You can ask or make them sign up for your newsletter when submitting their site. When you send your newsletter make it valuable information and you won’t get any unsubscribers.
Do your research before starting a new site. Look at which sites are already existing, what is needed and wanted and then make one that is the best in a certain field. Like if you find there is 20 similar sites like the one you want to make, figure out how you can make it the best of them.
If you offer services try to always give more than what is expected and you will build up a good reputation.
Find forums in your special field and provide useful information and help people by answering their questions etc. Have your site in the signature and you will see that it will be more known.
In the bodytext concentrate on the visitor and not on yourself.
If you have a site that sells things or services, don’t speak about money the first thing but how you can help the visitor. In addition add pages to the site with valuable information that will drive visitors to the site that maybe is not interested in your services but maybe in some month will be.
The big search engines have million of variables in their algo, don’t try to cheat it. Spend the time writing instead.
Study the SEO field by reading articles and forums to learn more each day and catch the algo changes and follow up with finetuning your site.

Best Personal Advice

Don’t make a web site to make money, make a web site to the benefit and help to your visitors and you will see that the money will come.

Blogger's Paradise

2006-09-12T07:29:00.000-07:00

Since the start of blog revolution in early 90s, different terms have passes to describe it. When Blogger.com was launch in 1999 by Pyra labs, it becomes more popular among people who love online journals. Until 2003 when Google acquired Blogger, it becomes more popular and commonly used today. Blogger is the most easiest way to published your personal blogs in minutes. With its popularity among teens, lots of weblog has been produced. There are blogs on personal account, dating, cooking,politics, name it you have it there. Some people owns several blogs because they have several interest to discuss and share. Mine was on Blogger too, And I'm already familiar on its features and aesthetic. Blogger offers variety of templates that you can choose from and if you are a bit of programmer and fond of tinkering codes, editing its templates is a fun to go. You can customize it and change its styles as you like it.

For me, it started as experimentation until I discover more of its potential. To stand out among other bloggers, you need a customized blog design and templates. The only problem among these pre-built templates is it is limited so people tend to go for the same one.There's no other twist you can do if you like to build your own in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) scheme. You need to understant about HTML and CSS in order to make changes on its templates. Sometimes you need to add javascripts for some fancy features for your blog. If I have time, I will discuss on how to create you blog templates in my next post.

ALL ABOUT BLOGS

2006-09-12T05:03:00.000-07:00

The blogging revolution starts to invade the self-publishing instinct of Filipinos. Everyone wants to have their own space on the web. Everything they want to share even the life of their pets and even make "tsismis" blog of their house help.Now, discover how you can be part of it and harness its power to put your opinions out there. Blogging or Blogs are textual expression of one person's outlook and use the internet to publish it. Many people are now attracted to blogging and it captures mostly teenagers. For yuppies or young professionals they tend to do blogging more seriously and discuss something of their interest. Blogs comes in several form now and continue to create new medium, it has video blog, photoblog, audio blog among others. And formy project, i will discuss the behind the scene of the development of what i called " The Blogsphere".

World of Blogs

2006-09-12T05:02:00.000-07:00

The blogging phenomena captures the heart of filipinos rapidly. It goes with the craze of texting and for sure, as we invade the world in friendster, we can also do the same in blogging. So what is really a Blog? On this part and succeeding part of my blog will concentrate on the discussion about blogs. All you need to know and how to start your own personal blog.

Techtrends@Work!

2006-08-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

I am starting to blog...