Here’s some blog posts on Search Trend Optimization:

• www.blogopreneur.com/2007/03/13/search-trend-optimization
• www.andyhun.com/2007/08/search-trend-optimization-is-this-going.html
• www.achever.com/ecomm-meeting-1-sep-2007-search-trend-optimization.html

Recently, I optimized a relatively new blog (created on 17 Feb 2008) – http://wassup.myblog.sg, to test out the search trend optimization technique.

Case Study 1: Natas Travel Fair 2008

I first made a post related to Natas Fair on 23 Feb 2008. Then 3 days later, I made a very short post on the Natas Travel Fair 2008. Over the past 10 days, the new blog wassup.myblog.sg attracted nearly 400 visitors looking for information related to “natas”. All these visitors came through the search engine listing because of 2 short blog posts!

Traffic Sources Keywords Report by Google Analytics

If you have a travel related blog, go made a post on the next Natas later this year and see the increase in visitors to your Web site.

Case Study 2: Singapore IT Show 2008

The Singapore IT Show 2008 will start this Thursday, 6 March 2008. My blog post on the IT Show event was made yesterday, and it is now ranked among the top 10 for several “IT Show” related search terms.

Google SERP: IT Show 2008

Google SERP: IT Show 2008 Singapore

With good rankings for such targeted search terms, I am expecting a signification increase in the number of visitors to the blog over the next few days.

If you plan to visit the IT Show this week, I suggest that you blog it and see the result for yourself.

Please leave your comment below if you mentioned about the event in your blog.

In-House SEO Training Workshops

Back in December 2006, I was engaged by Royal Plaza on Scotts to conduct a 2-day SEO Workshop. We had about 10 participants: the CFO, Revenue Director, Revenue Manager and marketing executives. They wanted to understand how search engine optimization and search marketing could help them to increase visitors to their Web site and to ensure that their Web designers and developers were doing the right things.

Here’s some of the photos taken during the workshop on 10 Dec 2006.

At that time, Royal Plaza on Scotts was one of the first independent hotel, maybe even the first hotel in Singapore, to have engaged a professional SEO consultant to train their management and marketing staff in search engine optimization and search marketing.

Congratulation to Royal Plaza on Scotts

It is no wonder that this Singapore hotel wins the silver in the Adrian Awards organised by the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International(HSMAI). As an independent hotel, I think it is quite a big deal to win such an international award among top hotels from around the world.

Well done and congratulation to the management at Royal Plaza at Scotts.

Btw, the buffet at the Royal Plaza at Scotts’ Carousel is one of the best in Singapore.

I highly recommend it if you are looking for place to enjoy your lunch/dinner or entertain your clients in Orchard area. Make sure you book in advance because it is usually full-house during lunch.

What makes your content addictive?

• It is Not the useful information you provided.
• It is Not the radical idea that you mentioned.
• It is Not the pretty pictures.

It is about trust and entertainment. You have to gain the trust of your readers and you have to consistently entertain your readers – they have to feel pleased after reading what you’ve said.

You can write using simple words to paint a visual picture in the mind. And, ultimately, you have to be able to touch their hearts with your careful use of words.

Have you ever sliced up lemons? Remember that refreshing scent as you cut them into triangle slices. It’s nice, isn’t it?Now, imagine holding up a slice of that fresh yellow fruit and slowly put it into your mouth, taste it… How do you feel?

Not only you’ve to make them see, hear, smell, taste and touch, you have to appeal to their emotion – they must have a feeling for your writing in order for them to be addicted.

Addictive copywriting works best with blog. And I will learn and sharpen my writing skill and hopefully in the not too distant future able to write to thrill!

The 5 Tips to Addictive Blog Writing

1. Keep it Simple and make it clear. Write short sentences.
2. Keep it Credible. Say things that you actually have the experience doing it. Your readers will can tell if you are truthful.
3. Keep it Clean. Use graphics sparingly, just enough to add some colors, liven it up and make it interesting. Don’t turn your blog into a firework display. Also, make sure your ads are relevant and keep it to the minimum, especially on your homepage.
4. Keep it Original. Your readers do not want to read something that they have read elsewhere before. Develop your own style and write from your own experience with your own opinion and viewpoint.
5. Keep it Entertaining. Don’t be too serious. This is a blog after all. So give your readers something refreshing. Read your own blog aloud, if it sound boring, hit delete. Yes, the entertainment industry can be cruel.

Ultimately, you’ll need to know your readers well in order to give them the feeling that they are looking for to keep them coming back. This is something SEO cannot do – search engines have no feeling!

You’ll see that I’ve rounded the corners – no more sharp corner and a step closer to Web 2.0 design!

These are some of the changes:

• Main column on the right and sidebar on the left
• Monthly archive on main page
• Comment on individual post page
• Added rel=”nofollow” to some of the external links

However, the most important factor in this design is to make the the main page, the individual post pages and the archive pages as SEO friendly as possible. I can probably showcase this design as an example of SEO Web Design.

In fact, this new design and layout is to prepare for a port of this blog to Wordpress. So far, I have published more than 120 posts. It can be painfully slow to re-publish the entire blogsite when I update the blogger template.

It will be another 2 weeks before I have the time to start playing with Wordpress and customise the template. I can see that it will take several sleepless nights to achieve the effect and result I desire!

Currently the top position in Google for the kyeywords “singapore hotels” is hotels.online.com.sg – a big portal that contains thousands of pages and has thousands of backlinks. It is also ranked top 2 in Yahoo. It would take considerable resource to usurp such a strong competitor. My aim is to get ranked for keywords that are related to hotels in Singapore, such as

• room rates
• online reservation
• discount hotels
• hotel accommodation

I believe it is possible given sufficient time, say 3 to 6 months to get into the top 10 ranking. Or at least in the top 20 for the search phrase Singapore hotels or Singapore hotel.

Still I think it would make life easier if we just stick to one URL for our domain. That is, if you have elected the www version, even if your visitor use the non-www version, your web server will present the www URL.

How Do You Re-direct Non-WWW to WWW?

If you are using Apache web server (Linux), you can use mod rewrite to re-direct non-www to www. You will need to have access to the web server – via FTP or CPanel File Manager.

The file to be edited is .htaccess

Add the following lines to the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www..*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^([^.]*).(com|com.sg)
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.%1.%2%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

The above script will redirect:

http://yourdomain.com or http://yourdomain.com.sg
to
http://www.yourdomain.com and http://www.yourdomain.com.sg

If you are not using the Singapore dot com domain name but Malaysia dot com or Indonesia dot com, then replace the “com\.sg” with “com\.my” or “co\.id”.

One advantage of the above script over the one that I adopted from Search Engine News is that this script will leave subdomain.yourdomain.com intact and not re-direct it to www.subdomain.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com/subdomain/.

Redirecting WWW to Non-WWW

And here’s a simple script for you to add into the .htaccess file if you want to re-direct www to non-www.

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

The above script will redirect:

http://www.mysite.com
to

http://mysite.com

Even if you have sub-domains, the above script will work beautifully.

The above scripts had been tested and used in many of domains I owned and they are working perfectly. Here’s the demo:

• http://mywebculture.com >> http://www.mywebculture.com
• http://www.designerseo.com >> http://designerseo.com