SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

“Annexing my existence in the realm of online marketing ”

by:

Jose Marie Eugene E. Jambongana

The very essence of an SEO professional can be summed up with colloquial terms and jargons pertaining to the meta physical realm of Search Engine Optimization. Success in search engine optimization is all about perseverance, determination to succeed amidst hindrances, resilience to all the negativity that one might encounter and the most important key factor, patience. Like all endeavors there is no such thing as overnight miracle recipe for success, one has to invest a boat load of hard work. Discipline is also a definite key factor, once you have a structured outline of your daily day to day tasks results will come. It’s all about consistency once you have focused on a goal with psyched up mindset and mentally to gobble up even the most trivial info, what’s there to stop you?

To begin with let me state a brief overview of SEO, whats the use of having a visually stunning website if no one can find it? Hence one has to venture out and invest in SEO all the while it is an amorphous, open-ended task. It includes a wide variety of activities, ranging from editing HTML to reading blogs, researching key words, link building, analysis, tracking online conversions, benchmarking to cite a few. Basically I can compare to bodybuilding, (“I know I know you might be wincing at the absurdity of this comparison.”) . To clarify things all the things that I have stated earlier is primarily the same principles that apply to bodybuilding. It is a competitive sport that really needs your undying attention, passion, drive, determination and patience, research, trial and error, weekly assessments, which partly takes time to see results. With those things in mind I chose to be an SEO advocate since the similarities are endless. Let me note some key aspects for due consideration, in SeO one has to take in to account the bigger picture for your entire campaign as well as keep in mind that every little thing you do will adversely affect the end results either for the worst or for the better. Make tactical analysis on the situation and think a few moves to decisively leap ahead of the competition. In my humble opinion SEO is an art form with countless tools in your repertoire to create masterpieces that yield exceptional ROI for you and your clients. The gratification and recognition for your work is definitely a great incentive but to me what really matters is the rush, the satisfying feeling of accomplishing something, pawning your competition if I may cite some l33t sp34k.

Moving on with the task at hand, the primary building blocks of a good campaign are as follows. Keywords are the terms entered by searchers in the search engine, these are the essential components that can make or break your campaign. you can optimize your site for general, popular keyword phrases, or you can choose longer, more specific, less popularly searched phrases. The former may bring you a large volume of general traffic, while the latter, the long tail of search, may bring you fewer visitors that are highly targeted. And this would be your spider bait, since spiders can’t read flash contents nor images. Except the labels for those images. Paid Placement (PPC) is unmatched in the power it gives you over your listing: what it says, who sees it, and when. PPC is also a tool for studying the response to your keyword choices. Amongst the three top search engines primary Google, Yahoo and MSN the most important factor the Page Rank is exclusive to Google and Google alone. Through various tools we can make an assessment regarding Indexed pages, Inbound Links, gathering web analytics. To begin basic site optimization one should have structured daily task goal. Day 1 can be for Page titles then next would be for Meta Tags, Site Text, Internal Link or Outbound Link. Google adsense can automatically assign relevant ads for your site. A specific targeted keyword should have an exclusive landing page on your site so that there would be no duplicate entries in the search engine. Otherwise it would clutter the results. Link building is basically networking now a days it’s really a matter of who you know. Like minded people share similar interest and once a product that interest a particular group can get popularity boost through word of mouth or in this case social networking, social bookmarking. An influx of social networking sites and social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Naymz, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Craigslist, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter have greatly increased traffic.

Whew, to think about it I have only began to skim the possibilities and intricacies that SEO has to offer. Over the past weeks I have read countless articles, viewed numerous videos regarding SEO. All I can say is WoW, I knew it would be quite contrived and influx of information can be cumbersome to say the least. As a principle I have come to acknowledge one important aspect of SEO. It is not about your site—it’s about every page of your site. Every single page in your site stands on its own merits and can sink or swim based on its unique combination of the factors if you approach SEO as a page-by-page endeavor, you will be on a surer path to success . Another important thing to note is about ROBOTS, search engines have their specific bot as a comparison list.

When it comes to the right now SEO strategies the web is littered with new concepts, mishmash of organic and paid strategies that are to convoluted for a beginner such as me. Other professionals in the forums offer conflicting advices and saturated with rumors that yield abysmal results. Several recommended and trusted sources include, SEOMOZ.org by Randy Fishkin, Jakob Nielsen “The father of usability”, Christine Churchill, Richard Jenkins, SEOBook which also offers an excellent SEO Toolbar.

Come to think of it I need to be practical and stick to the basics, with the Page Title, Meta Tags, Description and so on. So as to not be overwhelmed by the complexities. It is just a matter of time and experience along with my comprehension to absorb all the necessary details concerning SEO.

Sometimes, I feel that the emphasis on blogs and blogging have taken dangerous heights. Especially with someone who has to sell his products online. There’s enough and more information flowing around that says setting up a blog on your site is the “band aid” to your falling SERP ranks. Blogs do help in oiling back the machine but I’m seriously concerned over the “setting up a blog” part of it, I strongly disagree that just by setting up a blog, some miracle is going to happen. No.

Blogs and social media should be embraced in the right way with lot of commitment and involvement. You should be able to “utilize” blogs and the social media channels to your benefit. You should still be able to deliver content frequently, should be able to connect with the audience and on top of all able to deliver quality without actually promoting your products directly. Its easy to piss off people with your content and in blogging its a bit too easy to. So you have to be really careful with

In the complex and highly competitive world of SEO. One has to develop a keen habit of being constantly vigilant for quaint details that could ultimately make or break what you have striven to achieve. Here are 5 highly essential rules to go by in order to effectively indexed dynamic contents.
Rule #1: Always provide a regular HTML link to all pages on your website.
A quick remedy for this can be done by creating a standard “href ” type link that directs to all your dynamic pages.
Rule #2: Set up an XML site map if you can’t create regular HTML links to all of your pages, or if it appears that search engines are having trouble indexing your pages.
If you have a large (10K pages or more) dynamic site, or you don’t think that providing static HTML links is an option, you can use an XML site map to tell search engines the locations of all your pages.
Rule #3: If you must use dynamic URLs, keep them short and tidy.
Another potential problem – and this is one that is subject to some debate – is with dynamic pages that have too many parameters in the URL.  Google itself in its webmaster guidelines states the following: “If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.”
Rule #4: Avoid dynamic-looking URLs if possible
Besides being second-class citizens of search, dynamic-looking URLs are also less attractive to your human visitors.  Most people prefer to see URLs that clearly communicate the content on the page.  Since reading the URL is one of the ways that people decide whether to click on a listing in search engines, you are much better off having a URL that looks like this:
Rule #5: De-index stubs and search results
An interesting alternative would be “website stubs”. These are pages that are generated by dynamic sites but really have no independent content on them.

1. The Page Title
As you may have guessed already the page title is the data that is pulled from your title information in the head section of your page.This is the data given in the tags.

2. (Snippets)
This is normally seen as a text in around 25 words. This information is taken from three sources.
(i) The meta description

(ii)The DMOZ open directory – If the site is listed in DMOZ, the description is picked from there.
When the information is not available from the above two places, google searches for contextual content from your sites copy and picks up relevant information from either a single paragraph or one or more sentences from all over the page.
One thing to note here is the it is approximately 160 characters long, so if you would like to write an attractive meta description that would prove as an ad-copy and more visitors would be prompted to click on your URL. Make it attractive as well as relevant.

3.URL -
Plain and Simple, as indicated this is derived from the websites’ URL. It also takes into consideration your preference settings in the webmasters account. If you had preferred it as http://yourdomain without the www, it would show that way in the SERPs.This is the page Google will take you to when clicked.

4.Page size
Just next to the URL there is a tiny text showing the file size of the document you will be directed to when clicked.

5.Cache
Right next to the page size,a blue link is shown that will take you to the cached version of the website. The cached version is simply the copy of the webpage google saved when it last visited your website. If it had visited your site last week, then you’ll have the page from last week.

6.Similar pages
This link will take you to other identical pages to the one that is listed prior to it.

7.Note this
A tool to for a quick notation on data you would like to focus on at a latter date.

8. Plus box and Stock info
If the website or the comany is listed at the stock exchange, google will display it’s shortcode, and if you click on it a small menu will be displayed showing the graph of how the company did at the stock exchange for the last few months.

9.Sitelinks
The site links are very interesting. Many people wonder why only a few sites(popular ones) have the site links shown while others does not. I know for a fact that Google does not take money from webmasters for displaying it. Because the company that I’m working for right now has sitelinks but we did not pay Google to show it, it happened automatically. I’ve discussed about sitelinks here, you may want to check out.

10.More results
This link will take you to more pages from the site. In the example, it will show the next few inside pages from the starbucks website, apart form the ones those are shown in the sitelinks.

These information might seem trivial to the advanced professionals but for a upstart SEO aspirant such as me these are worth their weight in gold. Hope you found this as a enlightening read to jolt a creative spark to invigorate your enthusiasm and passion for the game of dominance that we play amongst other SEO elitist.

JoM

I continued viewing the SalesForce.com presentation and tutorial videos whilst reading up on SEO topics in the web.
I researched a plethora of voice recording softwares that would be quite useful for our company. While also browsing through the tutorials. I was also instructed by Ms. Hayzent to create a wordpress blog wherein I could let my creative juices flowing and blog about my daily interaction, learning, basically all things here in VAT that I have come accustomed to. This is a compulsory blog mind you so I have to keep it simple and concise yet enjoyable to read.
It is truly a humbling experience as always to have Mr. Dan Dahlen as my mentor. He showed me how to access the SalesForce.com account. I was able to create a new lead for a potential client. Whom I don’t have luxury to include in this journal due to confidentiality reasons. But I can attest the usability and ease of access of the salesforce CRM. It is truly a remarkable web 2.0 system which provides accurate and optimal management of the account details of our clients.