Inside AdSense: Optimization Essentials (Part III)

The next Adsense video tips.

Inside AdSense: Optimization Essentials (Part III)

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,page rank,AdSense,google

SEOmoz | How To Actually Get Links From Your Linkbait

The post from SEOmoz about the use of PR Web for gaining back links from you linkbait. While we commonly make use of Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, the resulting traffic may not always be relevant to your business. The quality of traffic from PR Web can be much better and eventually induce real business.

Worth looking into it.

SEOmoz | How To Actually Get Links From Your Linkbait

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,page rank,google

19 Must Have Tools that will let you know

A good list from specky boy on SEO tools, no matter it is for syndication, traffic measurement or keyword suggestion, the tools should be suggested to website starter, it will certainly help in maintaining the ongoing performance of your website / blog, the following is an excerpt:

• dnScoop - rating of website
• Quarkbase- find complete information about a website
• AbouThiSite - lite version of Quarkbase in functionality
• Siterake - rating of your website in chart
• Trendrr - compare and share traffic trend data
• Measure Map - track the visitor behaviour
• Website Grader - measure the marketing effectiveness
• BuiltWith - for website analysis
• Test My Web Hosting Speed - test the hosting speed
• Web Page Analyzer - analyze the website to improve the loadtime
• urlmetrix - check site popularity and ranking
• popuri.us - similar to urlmetrix
• FeedBurner - must use tool for syndicating the blog feed
• Feed Compare - compare the website with your competitors
• Compete - marketing analysis
• Alexa Rank - compare and analyze the Alexa rank of your website
• Technorati Rank - "Authority" of your blog
• PR Rank - tool for measuring google pagerank
• Whois.Net - update info about your domain name

 

How is your Blog Performing? 19 Must Have Tools that will let you know : Speckyboy - Web Design, Web Development and Graphic Design Resources

 

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,page rank,google

A new online photo sharing platform... stay tuned

Earlier on we have announced the development of iPhoto.org as a new website for photography. We have formed a development team and had a discussion. Our final decision is to acquire another dot com and develop a brand new online photo sharing platform.

Things are moving fast and we shall be announcing a site launch news later, stay tuned!

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google's SEO Starter Guide

Google has released a guide document on search engine optimization customized, certainly it worth downloading:

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google's SEO Starter Guide

 

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,page rank,google

Link Building Tutorial - A Complete Walkthrough of Building Quality Links

Another good tutorial on link building, it classifies link building into "Organic link building" and "Artificial link building".

Organic link building involves effort on your own site, like building better contents, start a blog to increase exposure and to check out similar contents on the web to get inspiration etc. It brings out a concept that before you market anything, we should always try to improve the quality of our own goods first.

Artificial link building involve some manual work on web promotion, like link exchange, submission to search engines, writing press releases and to get involves in widgets and RSS syndications etc. 

Check out the following link for more information, another comprehensive information here also : 7 Steps to make a perfect Link Bait | Linkbaiting

External Links (Links coming from other sites) was (*and still probably is) one of the major contributor of any Search Engine Optimization effort. Obviously links alone cant help you to rank well in the Search Engines, but they do play a major role to push your ranking up to the top.

Link Building Tutorial - A Complete Walkthrough of Building Quality Links

 

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,page rank

25 Design Best Practices for Your Small Business Web Site - Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Search Engine Watch got a nice article on how to build a good small business web site, the tips shall be useful to startups who want to do some marketing at low costs. Whatever it is, careful planning should be done before building the web site as it is a major channel for customers to find your business.

Think from an audience perspective and focus on building contents that can interest them. For example, if you are a software solution vendor, your major contents  should be your portfolio and clients served (New customers will look for this as your references).

Look a look at the below tips and see if they can be applied.

1. Install Analytics! Notice how I bolded that one? It's so important it's at the top of the list!
2. Create an eye-catching header/logo. This makes an impression on visitors, much like the façade, front door, or foyer of your store.
3. Ensure you have the right balance between text and graphics. Graphics-heavy Web sites with little (or no) text can make it hard for a search engines to determine the relevancy of your site to queries you should rank for. Images and graphics, on the other hand, help tell a story about your products and services.
4. Allow space for a minimum of 250 words of relevant text if possible.
5. Consider how easy the home page and interior pages will be to manage in the future. Can you easily add pages and redirect old pages to new ones?
6. Write unique page titles and meta descriptions for each page. This is ad copy, so take advantage of it. Sell using great keyword phrases and calls to action.
7. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to keep excessive code out of the way. This leaves a clean and concise interface for the search engines.
8. Your phone number should be prominent and located at top of page in large type. The higher the better.
9. Use a readable font and font size, and one that is hopefully easily scalable for low-vision users.
10. Buying or reserving information should be prominent and above the fold (book now, checkout, shopping cart, etc).
11. Break up long paragraphs with photos or bullet points. Having great paragraphs of text bores your user -- give them information in a concise and easy to skim manner. Search engines don't care how the words are delivered -- paragraphs or bullet points are fine -- just as long as your services and products are fully described on each page.
12. Bold only key ideas in the text. Adding too much bold will over-emphasize the whole page, which is counterproductive.
13. Create logical and custom navigation with "Product" and "Purchase" links in clear view.
14. Use text navigation not JavaScript. Text navigation is easier for search engines to follow, allows deeper access to your site, and helps get your pages indexed.
15. Place strong call to actions throughout the site. Make it very easy for your user to find the "buy" button and get through your checkout process.
16. A simple few hyperlinked keywords (make them blue underlined) in a paragraph can also be a simple call to action that encourages visits to interior pages. Don't overdo it or the text will become difficult to read.
17. Use header tags (H1-H6) on every page -- your tag should support the page title and be relevant to on page content that follows it.
18. Use quality graphics and photos, including Flash elements and photo slideshows. Poor photography can lead to less trust in what you're offering. Remember: a picture is worth 1,000 words.
19. Don't overload your contact or RFP forms with information. Make it simple and easy to fill out and submit -- name, phone, e-mail address, and comments are the basics.
20. If you ask for personal information via a sign up or contact form, then you need a privacy policy.
21. Physical address and phone number in text form on every page is a great way to associate your storefront or service business with a geographic location. Make sure you don't skip this step.
22. Location of business should be prominent/obvious on the page -- town, region or even a regional colloquialism. For example: Finger Lakes, SoHo, DIA, Orange County.
23. Have a static HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap that can be uploaded to your Google Webmaster Tools account.
24. Remember: when you add pages to a site, update your navigation and sitemap.
25. Consider having static sitemap links that use main keyword phrase for the page it links to. It doesn't hurt to wrap some descriptive text around those sitemap links either.

25 Design Best Practices for Your Small Business Web Site - Search Engine Watch (SEW)

 

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,web design

7 Steps to make a perfect Link Bait | Linkbaiting

Linkbaiting is the technique of writing valued contents that attracts ('bait') other web sites to link to it. The approach is directly related to the good quality of content and is considered to be a bright art in search engine optimization.

To quote from Wikipedia, link baits can be of several forms:

Informational hooks - Provide information that a reader may find very useful. Some rare tips and tricks or any personal experience through which readers can benefit.
News hooks - Provide fresh information and garner citations and links as the news spreads.
Humor hooks - Tell a funny story or a joke. A bizarre picture of your subject or mocking cartoons can also prove to be link bait.
Evil hooks - Saying something unpopular or mean may also yield a lot of attention. Writing about something that is not appealing about a product or a popular blogger. Provide strong reasons for it.
Tool hooks - Create some sort of tool that is useful enough that people link to it.
Widgets hooks - A badge or tool, that can be placed or embedded on other websites, with a link included.

The requirement of link bait should be more than merely interesting contents, instead it should be valuable and heart-touching materials that induce audiences to share it with their peers.

Always think from a visitor's perspective, you may find a piece of news very informative, or a piece of joke that is very funny, but what makes you put a link to it on your website / blog? More specifically, the link must NOT be a no-follow one. A perfect link bait can become a good landing page for your web site, eventually draw visitors to other pages as well, it may not be necessary to have every posts to be outstanding in your blog, just have one once in a while will be good enough.

We aim to build a sustainable, long-lasting link bait. The following is a check-list for you to do it step-by-step:

1. Brainstorm the content

Baseline: What kind of contents can actually interest you to read till the end?If you won't read to the end, hardly you find it valuable enough to link to it. Normally, we need longer essays in order to be informative enough. For a long lasting link bait, the content itself has to be substantial for recurrent visiting. Jokes or comic like contents can make people smile for a second, at most digg it or vote it on stumbleupon, but that won't last long. Spend some time to write a real good passage that is easy to read. Too wordy like this post may not be a good example.
Some contents can be:
- How-to List (101-list, How to do... etc)
- Cooking recipe
- New technology (must be new and have in-depth analysis.)
- Reviews (Movies, Games, Products etc. better with more photographs and illustrations. This kind of bait is time limited as long as the product itself is still popular)
- Controversial topic (eg. politics, deliberately induce discussion)

2. Give it a great title

Baseline: Imagine you are reading in your news aggregator with many title of same topic, what kind of title will make you click on it?
Probably I will go for some generic ones with titles can clearly deliver the message. Take the topic SEO for example, I may pick "How to optimize HTML pages for search engines" or "10 Tips for Link Baiting". Sometimes the contents within can be very generic, but you usually buy in for whatever reason. Lets have some more examples below:
Goods
- "The Office Guide to ...." - use authority
- "101 List for ...." - an easy checklist for reader (should be long one)
- "5 Steps to ...." - another checklist style
- "How to do .... in 24 hours" - sound interesting
- "Google Adwords (or other new products) Released." - should at least contain a link to the official site. Can attract visitor but hardly a link.
Bads
- "My first SEO website" - using the word "My", too personal, not related to reader at all.
- "「SEOの意外な裏技」" - good for Japanese readers only, readers confined geographically
- "SEO Professionals" - too generic, without clear description on contents.

3. Design the page

Baseline: From so many web pages that you have browsed, was there any good example of page layout that made you feel comfortable when reading?
So you may know from web design perspective, the followings matter:
- Title banner - should be eye catchy with professional fonts and color.
- Page Layout - can consider putting the main content in central or on the left with right sidebar.
- Line distant - not to be too tight and compact lest it becomes hard for reader to go through the whole page.
- Proper sub header - give readers a break from time to time, also to highlight the important parts.
- Font styles and color - not to use too sharp colors (eg. red), mild color makes readers' eye comfortable. No specific constraints on font styles, but Arial or Verdana are common good bets.
The good design of the page is to make sure the good contents are not wasted, we want our readers to read through the whole page and at last find it worthwhile to be linked to.

4. Submit it to social portals

Baseline: Do I know any of these sites, do I have accounts in them?
Do some homework, this one and the followings requires real hard work. We have to kickstart the initial promotion efforts before people to know about your page, however great the content is. Check out 50 Useful Links for Search Engine Optimization (Part 1) for the aggregation websites. Register accounts and submit your page:
- Digg
- Technorati
- Reddit
- StumbleUpon
- Feedburner
- MyBlogLog
- Weblogs.com
- Del.icio.us
- dmoz.org
- Yahoo buzz!
- Slashdot
- Lifehacker
- Techmeme
You may also consider to submit your links by:
- Actively reading and commenting on others' blog (Do NOT overdo it though, give real good comments)
- Participating in forums, use your website as signatures (in a professional way, don't just write two sentence and give a link)

5. Boost up the initial visits

Baseline: How to keep your page listed at the top of featured list and sustain its popularity?
Same as starting up anything new, you have to build the reputation yourself in a good way. If you are starting a newsgroup, you may need a group of people to keep discussing until it is vibrant enough to attract outsiders to join. After you submit the page to portals, it is no harm to digg it once yourself, or vote it yourself, but just once! Notify your friends or peers to vote for you, build up a few votes and it will stay on top of list for some time. The rest will depends on your true contents, if it is good enough for others as well, people will digg or vote it for you until it gets into the top / feature list. Trust the snowball effects, the more people votes for it, the higher the chance you can get linked, more links means higher authority in Technorati which in turns will draw another tide of visitors.
Good and everlasting contents will not fade out with time. An essay can still be popular after a year time, it is always good investment to spend some time on composing now.

6. Follow up

Baseline: If you are posting on a forum, how to keep your thread on top of list all the time?
Visitors will have comments for your page, answer them. This will keep your page refreshed and active. New contents will tell search engines that your page is updated and get re-indexed. This in turn will give you a higher possible page rank. Your readers may love your site somehow, follow up with new related posts and keep your recurrent visitors.
Again, trust the snow ball effect, unless you slowly become a lousy writer again, or you actually abandon your web site, you can never expect how your visitor can draw new visitors (by sharing your page, social bookmark or whatever). But you have to pay in effort to sustain them.

7. Avoid the DON'Ts

Baseline: Is there any stupid things that I have done to fool the search engines before? Have I ever succeeded?
Be a good and ethical author. Your reputation is much more important than the traffic itself. Build good contents instead of taking shortcuts, the simple tricks that you can think of, search engines and social portals thought of that long time back and probably have ways to guard against them.
Try not to do the following:
- Link spamming
- Register a lot of accounts in digg and digg a lot of times (what about your IP)
- Comment spam others' blogs, say a few words and give a link (your comments can also be searched in search engines later on, readers will judge those also, demonstrate your substance)
- Spam the forum, same way

The last suggestion I have: Be Patient. You don't expect your readers to be linking to you over-night. Even for superb contents it will take some time to become popular. Just sit back and wait for good things to happen.

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,page rank

Adsense Optimization

Two funny videos regarding ad optimization with Adsense.

Optimisation Essentials (Part I)

 

Optimisation Essentials (Part II)

 

So basically the ad optimization is about the following few points.

• Best positions are top rectangles right below post titles and right sidebar
• Make the ad prominent for visitors to notice and click on.
• Adjust the look and feel of the ad banner and make it compatible to your site design.
  

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,page rank,AdSense,google

iPhoto.org opened up for development

Not long ago we founded iPhoto.org and intended to make it a social photography website available for all to share their experience and albums. To achieve the concept of being 'social', the website is now opened for comments on how it should be developed in the future.
There are several ideas that we have in mind:

• Wiki
• Online photo album
• News syndicates of the latest photography news

We are offering this website to the world society of common interests and is now recruiting photographers, designers and developers to share your view.

If you are interested in the development of iPhoto.org , please join our facebook group and voice out how you would like the website be transformed!
http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=31316124679

Technorati Tags: photography,camera,canon,nikon,digital photography,iphoto,video

4 Ways CSS Can Improve Your SEO

http://www.cssnewbie.com/4-ways-css-can-improve-your-seo/

Good SEO suggestions from web design perspectives, the key point is about HTML formation, page layout, and web eyeball study.

In the world of SEO, size and location matter. If your page is significantly long, the content towards the bottom of your page won’t rank as “important” as the stuff at the top.

Page layout would be important both to content emphasizing and Adsense banner placement, apart from the tips given above, the Google Adsense Australia Team has  given similar suggestions on how to place the banner add in the most strategic position to maximize the click through rate.

Optimizing your AdSense performance

References:

Webpage and Web Site Design and SEO :: webeddy.com

SEO Web Design, Website Optimization, Search Engine Marketing

5 Rules of Web Design for SEO

 

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,page rank,AdSense,google,web design,css

SEO Basics Knol Page

http://knol.google.com/k/aaron-wall/seo-basics/38v8wakla8f98/2#

The page summarized a list of SEO tactics for beginners with topics covering:

1. market research
2. keyword research
3. on page optimization
4. site structure
5. link building
6. brand building
7. viral marketing
8. adjusting
9. staying up to date

From the ground up, as SEO is part of marketing we suggest to do a simple positioning analysis for your web site, figure out the market you are serving and who will be your target customers.

From that, try to figure out the searching habits of those target customers. For example, if a vast number of potential customers are happy browsing in Yahoo news, you may want to figure out some ways to optimize your site for Yahoo as well.

Figure out some keywords, use Google Webmasters Tools for help. Derive a set of keywords with least competition that can mostly reflect the characteristics of your product / services. There are a huge number of surfers who search specifically instead of using broad and generic search terms, try to target those as a long tail.

Apply common on page optimization. Like modifying the title and meta description to reflect the keywords about your site. Adjusting the frequency of keywords as appeared on your front page. Build in a nice infrastructure according to specific sitemap, nice inbound linkages will help in defining such structure.

Link building will require some time. Black hat tactics can sometimes help but overdoing will incur penalty from search engines. Try to make use of social networking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, MyBlogLog etc. to maximize interactivity and reciprocal links. Comments of blogs and participating in discussion forums can also help. But above all, a consistent effort is required.

Brand building and viral marketing are the next step that slowly build up the reputation of your web site and having a goodwill formed among the community, at that point, maintaining good contents is what it takes to sustain such good will.

Staying up to date would be important to both your readers and search engines, search engines normally crawl your site more if it keeps updated. To save some effort you may consider adding some dynamic contents ever changing to keep your page refreshed, but after all, at that stage an honest endeavor in keeping good content will be of utmost importance.

References:

SEO The Basics

Learning SEO Basics - Supporter of Ethical Marketing and Consumer

Google SEO Basics for Beginners

Search Engine Optimization Basics - Googlerankings.com

 

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,page rank

Importance of Disclaimer in SEO Business

Search engine optimization is one of a kind consultation projects which we can hardly measure the results, in order words the yield is abstract and it becomes harder to achieve customer satisfaction.

You may consider some of the followings as benchmark:

• Rise in Google Pagerank / Alexa rank
• Rise in the actual ranking in SERP
• Increase of visitors as on traffic statistics
• Goodwill as shown in social web sites like Digg, StumbleUpon etc.

On the other hand the followings may pose controversy or uncertainties in measuring the deliverables:

• Sustainability of ranking (Pagerank or SERP)
• Potential damage in reputation caused by suspected black hat tactics
• Users efforts involved to sustain the ranking, if in case not clearly stated in the beginning
• Difference in rankings as shown in local search engines

SEOmoz has given good examples in formulating the disclaimers and other relevant clauses in the service contract to protect SEO consultants, or allow them to have a better prior communications with their clients when aligning their expectations. Given the following example as quoted:

SEOMOZ MAKES NO WARRANTY, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, WITH RESPECT TO THE SERVICES PROVIDED HEREUNDER, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF RELIABILITY, USEFULNESS, MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NONINFRINGEMENT, OR THOSE ARISING FROM THE COURSE OF PERFORMANCE, DEALING, USAGE OR TRADE. By signing this agreement, you acknowledge that SEOmoz neither owns nor governs the actions of any search engine. You also acknowledge that due to fluctuations in the relative competitiveness of some search terms, recurring changes in the search engine algorithms and other competitive factors, it is impossible to guarantee number one rankings or consistent top ten rankings, or any other specific rankings for any particular search term.

The following is an example of an Opportunity to Cure which allow a buffer for consultant to fix a problem before ending up in a litigation.

Opportunity to Cure. Prior to any claim for damages being made, you must provide SEOmoz with reasonable notice of any alleged deficiencies in performance and SEOmoz shall have a reasonable opportunity to cure any alleged defect in performance.

Same as other kinds of service contracts, SEO consultants should employ careful provisions and clauses in the contracts as a more integral agreement with their clients. Such reference would be particularly useful given SEO as a relatively new kind of business.

Some reference links as provided below:

Manage Client Expectations And Reduce Your Risk By Including A Warranty In Your Client Contracts

Why You Should Give Yourself the "Opportunity To Cure" In Your SEO Consulting Contracts

SEO Contract Template: A Verbal Contract Isn't Worth The Paper It's Written On

html web design -  seo disclaimer

 

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,seo disclaimer,seo contract

Time interval for Page Rank increment

As a start-up company as SEO services provider, one of our primary mission is to implement optimization strategy on our own web site. Honestly how can you convince people if you are not high up on Google SERP within your own area?

Apart from all the tactics that we can apply on site and off site, we have constantly advise people to be patient as it takes time for a web site to become popular. At the same time we are constantly monitoring our rank on the WWW, trying to estimate the time interval of page rank increment.

Our site started in June and in approximately one month, the page rank increased to 2. There is a suspicion that the increment frequency of page rank is limited to the time interval. We expect the next increment will be of shorter interval due to the snow ball effect.

Technorati Tags: SEO,optimization,search engine optimization,hong kong seo,search engine marketing,internet marketing,page rank,AdSense,google