SEO Tips from Finggle SEO Workshop

I’ve had an intriguing 2 days at the Finggle SEO Workshop. Here are some of the top tips I’ve learnt from the SEO trainer.

  1. Know Your Purpose – Before you craft your first HTML tag, decide on the purpose of your site. Are you going for sales, leads, market awareness, or just to inform?
  2. Keyword Research – Especially if you are targeting local traffic, most popular “keyword tools” are secondary as compared to a good empirical subject matter research.
  3. Ranking is Dead – With Google Personalized Search in effect today, SEO is not only about ranking on page one, but also getting the clicks from the searchers when you do so. Ranking doesn’t mean traffic and traffic doesn’t mean conversions.
  4. Build Links Naturally – Even as you do your link building campaigns, strive for a consistent growth in link popularity and equity.
  5. Internal Linking – Half the war is won by linking the pages on your site correctly. Plan your site well so that you can achieve a good internal linking structure.
  6. Build Link Baits – Search your industry for examples, or think of something newsworthy, informative, humorous, or controversial. A well promoted link bait can give you thousands of links!
  7. Google Webmaster Tools – Check your account regularly so that you have a good overview of how Google sees your site.
  8. Analyse Your Analytics – Your analytics is your gold mine for SEO. Consult your analytics data regularly to uncover more keywords you can easily rank for.
  9. Write for Humans – Even though you need to include your target keywords in your web copy, don’t compromise human readability to cater for search engines. Write naturally.
  10. Don’t Make Your Visitors Think – Web design should be predictable, consistent and simple.

Finggle will be conducting their next workshop in mid-September 2010. Check out the out their SEO Workshop page for more details!

Singapore Web Hosting – Are They Trying Too Hard?

I was searching for an alternative solution for a web hosting server based in Singapore and I found one of the sites listed on the first page having this:

Singapore Hosting Server

This site looks great to average person, but digging further I “accidentally” found these text “hidden” in the header using H1 tags.

Web Hosting in Singapore

And these don’t only appear in the first page, but on almost every page on their site.

Gosh. I know Singapore Web Hosting is a very competitive industry… but are they trying too hard? Hiding text like that is definitely black hat SEO, isn’t it?

Let me know – would you lose trust in a site when you find sneaky text like that?

Link Building: The Key to Exploding Visibility

Link Building SEOHave you ever felt even a little stressed about your online business, about why there are so few visitors and just not enough sales? Are you ever curious why some websites almost permanently appear in the search listings for the keywords you are targeting?

Well, stop worrying, stop analysing, stop being stressed.

Go build a link.

Yes, an incoming link.

There are tonnes of ways to do this:

  1. Comment on someone’s blog
  2. Write an article – submit it to Hubpages.
  3. Write another article – submit it to eZineArticles.com
  4. Submit a press release.
  5. Answer someone’s question in Yahoo! answers.
  6. Email webmasters. Ask for a link.
  7. Write something interesting on your site. Tweet the URL out to your friends.
  8. Participate in forums – change your forum signature to include your link.
  9. Submit your site to directories.
  10. Guest blog for someone.
  11. Get your site listed in one of your local club’s website
  12. Submit a WordPress theme / plugin
  13. Submit a YouTube video
  14. … the list goes on.

Remember, you can have the most beautiful site in the world, best ever sales copy that literally hypnotizes your visitors to empty their wallet with you, or the best email marketing and customer retention program in the world.

But without targeted traffic you will not have any sales. And traffic only comes from 3 places.

  1. Referred Traffic – coming from the links to your site
  2. Search Engine Traffic – and you get great search rankings largely based on number of links you have to your site.
  3. Direct Traffic – either thru an offline campaign, or building (1) and (2) so successfully that people type your URL in right into the browser

Either way, you gotta start with building a link. Then another. And another.

Building valid, relevant and quality incoming links is the online visibility TRUMPCARD. And its going to be for some time.

Enough said.

Go build a link.

SEO Copywriting Essentials eBook

seo-copywritingI’ve just read Ian Lurie’s SEO Copywriting eBook, “The Unscary, Real World Guide to SEO Copywriting” and I must say it is an excellent 30 pages of straight-to-the-point, easy to understand, no fluff content.

In his book, Ian explains very clearly 6 principles behind his writing techniques, and the things you need to watch out for when you want to publish information online and get it well ranked in the search engines.

The best thing about it is that the whole book was written in really clear and plain English – and frankly, if you know how to read English, you are up to the standard to digest the book.

Check out Ian’s book now! A definite recommendation for every online business entrepreneur… especially if you are are not technically inclined!

The Three Homes Every Webmaster Needs to Visit

SEO Spiders
Photo Credit: Jelene

As many SEOs may say, search engine optimization is about making you don’t do the wrong things; about making sure that your site is well structured and has all the elements in place so that your website appeals to the three powerful spiders (more powerful and Spiderman!) GoogleBot, Yahoo! Slurp and MSNBot!

But how do you know how the spiders sees your site?

Well, it’ll be good if the spiders would be even half as heroic and eloquent speaking than Peter Parker, coming to your website’s rescue milliseconds before you get into trouble, but unfortunately for us webmasters, the three very powerful bots are kinda deaf and dumb… :mrgreen:

Urgh… in fact, they maybe the worst citizens in the web! If they see you in trouble they’d be the first to erase off your web address from their address books, and even go around feigning ignorance of your existence!

How would you know?

You’d have to pay their homes a visit! That is where you can rummage through their diaries and personal log files to find all their thoughts, so you can make the necessary structural changes to your site, before they decide to isolate you from your peers and leave you stranded on a no man’s land.

Shhh… don’t tell anyone we’re plotting this intrusion. Here are their addresses:

For the naughty GoogleBot, go to Google Webmaster Tools.

For Yahoo! Slurp, go to Yahoo Site Explorer

and for MSNBot, go to Live Webmasters

They leave their doors wide open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

What should you look out for?

Here are three main things you need to look out for as you rummage through their homes, especially from GoogleBot’s home:

  1. The times they’ve tried to pay you a visit, couldn’t find you. They knocked on your door a couple of times, and but nobody answered. Most of the time, they write these cases on the 404th page of their diary.
  2. Check out what their favorite food is! From my knowledge, their favorite dessert is called “sitemap”. Maybe you’d like to serve them with that for start. You can order that from here, or if you have a WordPress blog just ask for the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin
  3. Top search queries. Find out what it is in your site that the spiders love, so you can work on giving more of that to them.

Go now. Go. So you can make sure your site remain in their address book for a long time to come. Check out what they think about you. You might be surprised… and shhh… don’t tell them I told you this. 😉