Singapore SEO and Singapore SEM » Singapore SEO and Singapore Search Engine Marketing

Google ranking technology trends - explained…

seoprosingapore — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:03:14 +0000

Amit Singhal of Google wrote a fantastic post detailing bring me back to the post i wrote about semantic the current technology that is the brainchild of Google’s influence to return search queries.

Many areas of the posts brought me back to the post in which i wrote about semantic search and how the search engines are shifting to LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) - which goes beyond retrieving exactly what a searcher queried in a Robotic fashion. If you missed that post go here http://www.seo-pro-singapore.com/seo-singapore/2008/06/semantic-indexing-just-better-search-a-smarter-search/

Here’s Amit’s post in the official Google Blog. One thing you would wanna stare at in particular would be toward the end of the post where Amit writes his explanation about CLIR (Cross Language Information Retrieval). I don’t know about you but this is big news for me because this means that as an SEO and Search consultant, clients range of search terms can be exposed to a wider geographic Market. For example in Google.vn (Google Vietnam) a searcher querying in native language in Google.vn Worldwide search will still have Vietnamese entries returned. What CLIR would do is present the user with results in other languages and make it accessible to them.

Cuil to rival Google

seoprosingapore — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:12:05 +0000

A new search engine launched today has market leader Google nervous. Why? Because Cuil.com (pronounced “cool”) is being touted as having the potential to topple Google off their pedestal. Yes, it’s been predicted before to no avail, but this time the critics might be right. Let’s take a look at reasons why:

1) Cuil can apparently claim the title of world’s biggest search engine, searching more pages on the Web than any other site. That’s three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

2) Cuil tackles the issue of privacy by promoting the fact that they don’t collect user data. Privacy concerns are apparently one of the main reasons users abandon Google in favor of other engines.

3) The three founders of Cuil know search inside out. They include ex-Googlers Anna Patterson and Russell Power of the TeraGoogle project and Tom Costello of IBM’s WebFountain project.

4) Even Danny Sullivan thinks Cuil could be a major player. As he points out:

“Google already did a blog post in reaction to Cuil and its size claims on Friday, before Cuil even launched or those claims became public. If Google’s paying that much attention, then anyone should.”

That’s good enough for me!

5) Cuil provides some unique tools for researchers and serious searchers. After you perform a search, you sometimes see a box on the right-hand side that says “Explore By Category” with a list of subjects related to your search. If you roll-over a category, it will open and show related refinements. It reminds me of the dig tool you sometimes see when performing keyword research on WordTracker or KeywordDiscovery.

And what exactly does “Cuil” mean? Apparently it is an ancient Irish word for knowledge. How very cuil!

Stay tuned to see if Cuil can make a dent in Google’s 1st place trophy.

The WWW Controversy

seoprosingapore — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:16:35 +0000

Just look at www.yes-www.org and http://no-www.org and tell me there isnt a big HOO HA over whether or not to include the WWW in your URL.

This is a debate and many people are saying that the WWW is not at all influential in regards to your site’s promotional efforts. Google WILL index both the www and non www version of your site.

The reason i am writing this article today is because i have noted a queer indexing and ranking pattern that Google did to my client’s site. The site had an xml sitemap submitted for “procedural” sake, and the sitemap was generated for the non WWW version of the site. Later, I did exactly the same, this time, generating for the WWW version of the site. Google picked up and indexed both occasions. But the rankings were significantly better for the WWW version of the site. Food for thought? As of now, this pattern is still occuring.

For example, of 20 URL’s or pages SEO’d and submitted, 20 are indexed under non www and 12 indexed under WWW. The moment the remaining 8 of 20 of the WWW pages are indexed, they get high rankings almost immediately. ( This is bearing in mind that the 8 remaining pages indexed under non www were not ranked, or low ranked.)

Anyhow, if you want to put your foot out of the confusion to ease yours and Google’s mind, simply modify your htaccess file and implement a redirect like so:

If you want to remove the “www.” add this to your .htaccess file (this works for Apache). If you don’t have a .htaccess file create one with this in it.

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you want to add the “www.” add this to your .htaccess file (Apache only). If you don’t have a .htaccess file create one with this in it.

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

In both cases swap out the example part for your domain and the .com part for something else if you are not a .com.

Singapore SEO-Web design methodology (Part2)

seoprosingapore — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:38:20 +0000

As promised, this is a continuation of the seo-web design methodology SEOPRO uses ourselves. It of course isn’t a hard and fast rule, rather just a healthy practise to get the most juice out of your campaign. So here goes.

4) Web Design Implementation

Next we come to the design of the site and the content that is going to be inserted. Who will do the design? Will you outsource this task or does the Company for example have an in-house web developer. Next thing is the SEO. Who will optimise the content and site? Again, outsourced or in house?

Anyhow, either way you choose to go about it, here are a few back to basic tips to recall. Meta tags are proven to get sites higher ranked than sites with meta tags not optimised at all. Content for example should have you preferred keyphrases spread throughout, strategically. There are too many other on page factors you should also take into account. Related pages should be interlinked with relevant text. What about images? They tend to cause a slow page load time, and even with small file sizes, they irritate the hell outta visitors. Here you go. Go to my resource page and you can find lotsa very insightful SEO tutorials I’ve put up for your use. Completely free. SEO and Search maketing tutorials.

5) Testing you Site

Okay now we arrive at testing your site. Remember, this post isnt to bog you down wit intensive exercises of running your site through web analytics programmes for days and staring at spreadsheet reports. We’ll just stick with the absolute necessity. Well the first logical thing would be to et people to scrutinise your site, always ensure an organised user experience and while you’re at that, run your site through a W3C validator. Make sure it is web compliant. The next basic thing would be to run your site through a “broken link” checker. I like this application, it gives a fairly good report. Alternatively, always feel free to utilise the host of tools i have on SEO-PRO-SINGAPORE.

6) Maintaining your site

Maintaining your site is just as important as any other step in this 2 part tutorial. You are up against search engines which change their algorithms frequently. If you do not maintain your site, it becomes stagnant, falls into supplementary listings, loses ranking, loses authority and ultimately all the effort you’ve dumped in initially. Who will conduct an SEO maintenance plan for your site? Will you engage external Consultants to rain your IT department for example? Here’s a simplified list so you have an idea of what a maintenance detailing should consist of. Look at point 7 of our SEO services page: SEOPRO services

More importantly, what a maintenance plan should focus on is the refining of keyterms. Tracking your results through simple log analyzers or intensive web analytics programmes can giveyou a good gauge of how responsive certain keyterms are performing. From there, it should be an integral part of your maintenance plan to constantly refine your keyphrase lists and test test test. “Is this really important?”, you ask. It sure as hell is, because tuning your keyword list can mean the difference between a wasted lead and a conversion, which means not leaving money on the table.

Singapore SEO-Web design methodology (Part1)

seoprosingapore — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:01:51 +0000

So you’ve thought about getting your site an online presence or perhaps are considering getting a new site for your business. What is elementary and yet crucial to understand is that you MUST build a website that includes search engine optimisation best practice principles as well as keeping in mind usability, audience and niche. You will immediately lose your chance at being competitive once the search engines determine that your site is uncrawlable or if your users have a hard time navigating through your site.

All in all there should be 6 crucial steps that you should obey as a rule of thumb.

1) PLANNING YOUR DESIGN

Before you rush off and built your site, decide what the purpose of your site is for. What is it existing for? Are you providing information? Is it an info-based site or a commercial site whereby you have product or services to sell? Know your niche. You have to determine this because everyone knows that there are only 2 kinds of visitors online, people looking for freebies (research, info, knowledge) and people willing to make a purchase. Know your audience well. It would be no point trying to figure out why you can’t hard-sell that “info-freebie” visitor even after 20 exhaustive follow-up Emails.

Bear in mind that marketing to people is all about getting the effective attention of a target audience that are looking for what you can give them. It’s all about matching things up correctly.

Here’s a WEwewe calculator. Go have fun with it and discover how “i” focused your sales pitch is.

2) Site Analysis

Im gonna try my best to keep this post short as i could ramble on through the day.

Now that you’ve identified your site goals, sizing up your competition can be a great step forward to help you gain a leverage above them. You can do anything as simple as:

Study their link architecture
Study your competitions target key-terms and don’t be the guinea pig. Use the effective ones.

And please, don’t give the poor excuse of not having resources or tools to do that. There are so many SEO tools that can aid you available freely online. Go to our site, here’s the link: SEOPRO. We’ve provided an arsenal of the best software online ALL FREE. Yes, we all like “FREE”.

3) SEO Design

I can’t stress further the importance of an SEO-friendly design. This is because that element can make or break your online business and the Search engines and online community can be very unforgiving.

2 aspects will be

1-your User friendliness. Research what your niche looks for in a site. Does it command authority through its design? Or does it look like a scrappy cheesy template? What are the crucial info your visitors expect to see? Certs, contact info,etc. What kind of navigation are they more inclined to? flashy hovers,pop up menus, css nav menus, horizontal, vertical?

2- Your Search Engine compliance and friendliness. You won’t believe ….i was browsing some SEO companies websites recently and not that i like to scrutinise but even these “industry experts” have scum in their coding! …more on that another time. Are you using frames, excessive redirects, excessive heavy javascript coding, flash,etc. All these are things you need to consider thoroughly.

Consider the language you will code in, or your website designer will code in. HTML? PHP? AJAX? FLASH?

Again, there are resources all over the Internet to do a ‘mom&pop’ comparison. Study and weigh the pros and cons of using the different programming languages and also be choosy about who designs your site. You don’t wanna be caught with your pants down.

Eg:A lot of web designers have the habit of using heavy javascript. Absolutely nothing wrong with that! Only that the search engines hate having a hard time wading through all that coding they deem as “nonsensical”. But, the correct thing to do should be to place your javascript coding in a separate file and link up to the file with a command like so:

where “filename” is a plain text file you seperate your java coding in.

Moving on, let’s consider the quality of content your site will host.

In my next post i will write about points 4, 5 and 6 where i dicuss Implementation, TEsting and Maintainence. Stay tuned and keep learning.

Singapore Web Design Company - Singapore Web Design Services

seoprosingapore — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:33:36 +0000

How much does your local web designer know about web design?

Be warned, choosing an incompetent web designer can kill your Online Business faster than you hand him the cheque.

Now, let’s for a second get back to the reason you are online. The reason you would wanna go online can only be related to a few. You have products or services to sell or you are an information based website. Whichever reason it is, you surely need a web presence. You need USABILITY and FINDABILITY. Without either, your site would be the equivalent of a “404 error page”

DID YOU SAY 404?!?

The TOP mistake that clients make is thinking that the sweeter the design, the better the web designer. This is definitely not always true. I had a client in the coal mining business who directed me to a website. So i went. And not surprisingly, it was completely done up in flash. Now flash has a workaround. My recommended Flash SEO method uses a DIV with search-engine-accessible, primary content, and an open source Javascript function called swfobject() to detect when browsers are capable of viewing Flash. When an appropriate version of Flash player is present, the Javascript manipulates the page’s document object model (DOM) to replace the primary content with the Flash movie. Most search engine spiders can’t handle Flash, so they will elect to view the primary content. The primary content may contain links, headings, styled text, images—anything we can add to an ordinary HTML page. But ask yourself, if you were a web designer, is that all worth it?

Nope! At least not to me.

The list of top web design mistakes made goes on from

Legibility Problems
Non-Standard Links
Content That’s Not Written for the Web
Bad Search Browser Incompatibility
Web site uses JavaScript, image maps, Flash and other multimedia techniques,
Web site uses splash page
Web site serves dynamically generated pages
Web site directory structure
Web site URL is not static
Web site uses frames
SE-friendly Content (not Search engine optimised)
Cumbersome Forms
No Contact Information or Other Company Info,
Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths,
excessive use of heavy javascript coding ( not having the sense to put the coding in a seperate file!)
…..here’s my favourite which i find extremely irritating:

Inadequate Photo Enlargement: After spending countless hours looking at real estate sites I’ll tell you that I find it extremely annoying to click on a “view larger photo” link and get a popup window that displays the same photo. What is the point of that?

I apologise if this overload of information appauls you. Let me cut to the chase and tell you what is the most important thing. The most important aspect of you web publishing project would be to implement an SEO Web design methology. “A WHAT??? What the hell is that?”

Stay tuned my friend, we will be going for a commercial break. In my next post i will write and teach you about implementing an SEO Web design methology into your campaign. Ciao!

Site promotion - How to go about it, the SMART way.

seoprosingapore — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:30:10 +0000

Yes, today’s topic i’m gonna share about what is effective site promotion. SEO(organic) and SEM(paid) do contribute to site promotion. But let’s put that aside today. I’m gonna write talk about article marketing and how this single strategy stands out among most other online marketing strategies.

Content is king and we all know that. What does unique content do?

Establishes yourself as an authority on the subject.
Gives your readers value
Has the leverage of utilising rich content and keyword prominence and density NATURALLY (which is what the search engines love)
An excellent form of delivering targeted traffic to your Site. Targeted traffic in this context is traffic that converts. Traffic that can Monetize

So how do we go about article marketing? Exactly. I’m gonna outline steps that you can take to kickstart your article marketing strategy fast.

1) Firstly, i must establish that this is something you cannot run from. You can to put on your writing cap and start create original and valuable content. It can be in the form of press releases or a “know how” article. Whatever form of article you’re writing, make sure is unique and of value.

2) Once you’ve done that, a basic step would be to submit your articles to article directories and article distribution sites. Here are the top 10 with pagerankinformation. Submitting your articles to directories with High pagerankcan contribute to getting your article indexed and found on the search engines more effectively. Apart from that, it can lead to a boost in Pagerank for your site. Remember, in SEO, this isn’t a guarantee despite what many will say. It’s simply a rule of thumb to follow.

	URL	Alexa Rating	Google Pagerank
1.	ezinearticles.com	340	6
2.	buzzle.com	4,271	6
3.	ArticlesBase.com	5,377	4
4.	pubs.acs.org/hotartcl	5,783	7
5.	searchwarp.com	6,734	3
6.	webpronews.com	12,584	6
7.	goarticles.com	17,624	3
8.	web-source.net	17,772	5
9.	articlealley.com	24,114	5
10.	amazines.com	26,887	3

3) When you create your articles, it will help greatly if you SEO your content. Meaning to have keyword or keyphrase rich content. Here are some tips on SEO-ing your article content effectively:

Optimise your content in a natural way, don’t just simply spam or keyword stuff the whole article.
Use your article title effectively, making sure your main keywords or points are in your title.
Links provided back to your site should be done with an href attribute and a anchor tag. Like so. When doing this, your anchor text should be your keyword phrase. Bear in mind that the keyword phrase should be relevant to the landing page of the link.

Text to be displayed

Taking effort to author and distribute powerful articles should be a heavy weighted strategy in your site promotion. Don’t ever neglect or under-look this strategy.

Article marketingon top of anything, goes a long long long long long way in SEO. It builts a strategy that LAST over time. It’s a great way to built viral distribution and popularity that can contribute targeted traffic in the long run.

Article marketing doesn’t just stop there. With some creativity, you can start a blog. Blog’s arent’ just for mickey mouse fun. They can be a great business promotion tool in your online business. Writing on your blog is essentially the same as submitting to article directories. Only difference is that you have to “publicize” your blog. But with some decent effort, once the search engines start indexing, they will constantly index the content on your blog. Contributing to your blog on a frequent basis will let the search engines know that your blog is of importance and has fresh content. This is a big plus with the SEngine’s algorithms.

The most important thing you must realise in this post is not the technique to go about marketing your content. The important thing to know is that in the long run, these articles you create will deliver multiple streams of visitors from each content. Not just any visitor, but unique targeted visitors that are more likey to be “called to action”. If i may say, this is site promotion at it’s best.

Get website higher rankings - SEO Singapore

seoprosingapore — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:38:50 +0000

If i can offer you as a reader advice on getting your site higher rankings in the search engines, what would i say? This post will not teach you all the technical hype and fluff about SEO. It will just highlight effective strategies that will more than raise your chances of getting higher rankings in the search engines. Well, firstly…

I’ll ask you to put aside all the technical optimisation knowledge you know or have obtained.

Firstly, brainstorm. Think about the products, services or messages your site or business has to offer. Make it clear to yourself that your site is out to GIVE your visitors something that is of value. We are not just talking common value.
Once you have listed down the values you can offer a visitor or a potential searcher, make the proposition a unique one. Do not offer your unique value or information with any hope of getting returns. Effectively, it should be with no strings or obligations attached. It can be anything as simple as offering a free Download for an Ebook jam-packed with quality information relative to your industry. In fact, that example has proven to be very effective.
Don’t even think about selling your service or products. Always remember the rules of marketing. No one like to be sold to, they are looking for something of value, a solution perhaps. Until you can offer value to your visitors, then they will become prospects. They will regard you as a knowledge source, an authorative source and gain your trust. Don’t be greedy or overwhelmed. You will get your chance later. Once they have your trust and you have their attention, then you can start “marketing the hell outta em”.
Your site should already have unique content for each page, i assume. If not, you should get down to implementing that. If home page for example is generalised content about your service or product, create an effective summary, making your keyword phrase apparent. Don’t dilute your unique content with fancy lingo or smart talk. People hate that. Always make sure the content is laser targeted at a topic, reiterated with keyword phrases. Your content should be fresh original and unique. This will get people to stay on your pages longer. Now do remember that the Search Engines go beyond looking at your meta data, H1h2h3 tags, keyword density prominence,etc. They are sophisticated and have deep logs stating your unique site pageviews, retention rate, bounce rate, etc. All these contribute toward your rankings too. Also, with the shift towards Latent semantic indexing and analysis, the search engines are smarter than to just associate your content with keyword jammed gibberish.
With that said, stick to the BASIC seo elements such as title and description tag, with h1 tags staing a header. Don’t overdo your SEO. It will get you no where. Focus on being original and writing targeted content.

Remember that this topic is trying to teach you SEO kept to a minimal, while shifting weight more toward your content value. If you follow these guidelines, you stand a pretty good chance or ranking for unique pages on your site.

How to Rank high in Google (Cheesy remark goes here)

seoprosingapore — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:06:25 +0000

Yes, i already know what you’re thinking. I apologise for the cheesy title on this post. This title, “How to rank high on Google” is probably one of the most overused article titles spamming the WWW nonsensically. Why i chose this title you’ll figure in a while.

Okay, so we all heard of long tail keywords and think we know how to use them. But only a handful of us actually exploit it. It is bloody effective. Let’s have a scenario.

So John from “Mary Dental Clinic” has read a ‘great’ mom-n-pop article that says targetting keywords 2-4 words in length is a more effective way of getting your material optimise, ranked and searched for. True. So John goes ahead to create….

“Cheap dental clinic”

“Professional cheap dentist”

“blahblahblah”

2 months down the road he checks his rankings and is dismayed to find out he has no rankings or poor rankings because of stiff competition. (in this scenario we assume lucky John is SEO Gurudized.) So he spends another 1 month doing his best and ‘hey presto’!!! He is 1st place! Then he turns to anti-depressants because he still isnt getting sales. People start calling him and hanging up after after shouting “You Sham! You said you were cheap!”

Well…. So to cut the sh*t short my point is that long tail keywords need not have direct relations with your service or product. Don’t think literally. Think like a layman. Research your search like a layman. For goodness sakes if i am looking for a dentist online in all honesty i’ll probably type in “Cheap dentist in Tampines“! This is targeted search. Now did John think about that?

Forget all the the fancy spanshy keyword research tools for a while. Throw them aside. Yes, my friend. This is seo at its best. Anyhow keyword research tools give varying results and statistics for count, popularity and competition because each tool is programmed to search a unique database, search in a different way, and conjure results in a different way. So each tool is unique. The most dependable and unique keyword research tool is yourself. With a decent grasp of Engrish and a sensible understanding of putting words together, you have a good chance of producing long tail keywords for your site.

Remember, think like a searcher would.

Here’s what John could have used instead:

“wisdom tooth extraction dental clinic”

“dental clinic for whitening teeth”

“blahblahblah”

Why long tail keywords?

1. Targetting long tail keywords naturally delivers higher conversions. The more specific your keyword phrase, the more targeted the prospect.

2. It’s easier to rank. DUH. Why? well, hushhush okay? Too many people are still optimising for lollypop keywords.

3. Higher traffic Flow. Supposing you create multiple landing pages with each page optimised by long tail keywords. Over time, you end up with many results in the search engines to many of your targeted matches. Equals more traffic.

4. Your site creates a higher monetization potential. Relevant visitors are more likely to purchase, become a lead or even click on contextual advertising. Doesn’t take a MIT grad to realise this.

Now do you see why i gave my post such a lame title?

More on long tail keywords soon. Till then, please don’t be a John.