This happened during the Las Vegas Pubcon a few days ago. Some SEO heavyweight gathered and gave comments on various web sites during the Interactive Site Review session. The panel of SEO experts consisted of Matt Cutts(Google), Tim Mayer(Yahoo), Greg Boser(WebGuerilla) and Danny Sullivan(SearchEngineWatch).
In my previous post on How to Improve Your Pagerank, I mentioned that one of the more powerful ways to increase link popularity and PR of your web page is through publishing quality content article and distribute it freely.
Now you can use this new Meta Search Engine to analyze your competitors’ web pages and compare search results from major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask.
There are many reasons for me wanting to migrate to Wordpress - 2 important reasons being the enhanced SEO friendliness and Trackback function.
Also, Wordpress is more powerful. There are many plugins available to extend the functionalities. I could also save some time whenever I tweak the template because there is no need to regenerate all the pages and upload to my server again and again.
However, the move is not easy. I have been losing sleep for the past 2 nights trying to customize Wordpress theme or template for TIMMGuru.com. I want to use the existing design and layout. And it was not easy to convert the template. The Wordpress theme is far more complicated than Blogger’s template. I have to search the documentation and learn the right commands and tags. I find the Conditional Tags necessary to customize the sidebar. As you can see, the display of this sidebar is different on the main page, individual post page and archive page. So I’ll need to do some progaming logic to control what appears on which page.
The basic type of pages for Wordpress are the
You can control what to appear in each of these pages! Now, flexibility comes with complexity!
I stumbled upon this blog accidentally - ????????SEO???? which translates to Daily Post on Search Engine Optimization Ranking - a Wordpress powered blog in Chinese. The author of the blog is Zac and he lives in Singapore. I met him once at Punggol Plaza and learnt a few SEO tips from him.
For those who are interested to learn SEO lingo in Chinese, this may be the best place to learn about the technical terms and the SEO market in China. Well, you need to understand Chinese in the first place.
70% of the Singaporeans should be able to speak and write in Chinese, right? And we should learn to use the correct SEO jargon in Chinese. That’s the Singaporean advantage.
The complete subject line should be…
Why Google didn’t like this blog As Much As Yahoo Does?
I suspect that I’ve added a thing in this blog that Google didn’t like. That is the Archive List.
First let’s understand what is Google Pagerank(PR). According to Google corporate information on technology,
Pagerank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives.PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value…
Now that we know what pagerank is, let’s see how we can improve our web pages pagerank values.
Pagerank is important as a measure of votes of confidence. It is important that you get as many links from other web pages as possible. Note that I said web pages and not web sites. Pagerank value is given to individual web page, not to the web site. So it is important that you get links from pages that share the same topic as your web page.
Usually, you will solicit backlinks to your homepage. However, you should also get backlinks to your internal pages. As a rule of thumb, you can spread your inbound links in the ratio of 60:40 - 60% to your internal pages and 40% to the main homepage.
In order to get links to your internal pages, these pages must have useful and interesting content. It is important that all pages are planned before you starting writing your first word. This is to ensure that your web pages are linked in a relevant manner. So that you can score better for Google’s Hypertext-Matching Analysis:
Google’s search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), Google’s technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.
Well, let me emphasize that you should focus on getting more quality links than worrying about your pagerank value. Google usually updates the pagerank value for all web pages every 2 to 3 months so you will be stuck with your current value for a long time before you’ll see any changes. However, as you are building your backlinks, the SERP of your web pages may have already improved and you will see increase in traffic before you’ll see an increase in your pagerank value.
The Old Ways of Getting Links
Traditionally, you can get backlinks by submitting to free and paid directories, include partner links or resources pages and solicit for reciprocal link partners.
Don’t get me wrong, these traditional methods are still effective and can grow your link popularity over a period time.
Links building is a tedious process. So you may want to make use of reciprocal link partners software and link analysis software such as SEO Elite, Arelis, Optilink, Traffic Travis and etc. to help you save time and automate some of the tedious process.
Links Building - There are Better and Faster Ways:
Since these are advanced techniques, I will discuss more in depth each of these methods in my future posts.
Someone ever asked me this “your site is PR1… How am I supposed to hire you as my consultant?”
You should. Because I can get a PR1 web page ranked in the top 30 results of Google for your targeted keywords. Isn’t it how you’ve found me on the web to ask me this question?
In fact, I see SEO ranking and PR as the “chicken or egg” paradox.
Let me explain.
If you don’t have good search engine visibility, how are you supposed to grow your backlinks and have high PR; but if you do not have high PR you will not be able to rank well for competitive keywords.
And the common belief is that when you have high PR, you will do well in the search engines. This is but half true. PR is a value given by Google and has nothing to do with Yahoo and Live(MSN) Search.
Read my yesterday post if you want to know more about the relationship between pagerank and SEO ranking.
I do not have pages with high PR, my highest attained PR was 5. Why? I have not spent much time and money on link building campaign yet as I choose not to compete for popular keywords. So there is no need for high PR to give me an extra edge. I just want to solve your practical problem, I want to use the most direct and simplest solution that costs me the least resources. If on-page optimization is all you need to get into the top 30 then do that first and worry about the more expensive off-page optimization later.
The home page at ShiHengCheong.com is ranked No.1 for the keywords Singapore SEO Specialist in Google and it is PR1. Get the point!
I’ve finally completed the new web design and layout for this blog. Don’t you think it looks better than the previous design? The last time I fiddled with Blogger template was at least 6 months ago and it took me nearly a week to customise a design template. (more…)
I am very happy today…
1. It’s Friday and this is going to be a super long weekend with 2 festivals - the Devali and Aidilfitri, coming up tomorrow and next Tuesday. Greetings to our Indian and Muslim friends!
2. The rain is finally here to clear the haze and the polluted air!
3. DesignerSEO.com is now ranked Top 10 for the keywords - Singapore SEO
It is really exciting for me.
DesignerSEO.com was registered in 6 March 2006. It went “live” in mid-March. It’s about 7 months old and is now Top 10 in Google and Yahoo.
http://www.google.com.sg/search?q=singapore+seo
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=singapore+seo
Think about it. Who else would optimize for such keyword? SEO specialists and experts lah!
It may not be a very popular keyword; not even worth 20 cents on Adwords for No. 1 position, yet it is a difficult keyword with tough competitors. Most of my competitors started out much earlier than me. Some made their websites 3 or more years ago, have higher PR and have hundred of pages indexed and ranked in Google and Yahoo.
Well, want to know how I really feel?
Go get your web page ranked for your desirable keywords and you will know how I feel now!
Shiok!!!
You can link to my website using the following HTML codes:
<a href=”http://designerseo.com”>Singapore SEO Web Design</a>
or if you prefer graphics, put this chicklet on your blog:
<a href=”http://designerseo.com”><img src=”http://designerseo.com/img/designerSEO_chicklet.gif” alt=”Singapore SEO Web Design” border=”0″></a>
And it’ll look like this:
Thank you for linking to my website!
