Tips for a Wordpress SEO blog

Here we posted some tips to get your wordpress blog rank higher in search engines without buying or exchanging links.

1. Google doesn’t care about link depth.

2. The file extension doesn’t matter - you could call files as php, html or even mattcutts.. this is not taken into consideration while calculating the rankings but don’t use the .exe extension.

3. Use a 3-4 word long ALT tag description with every image - good for SEO plus screen readers.

4. Use dashes to separate words, hyphens are OK but spaces are bad.

5. Standardize backlinks (don’t mix and match www with non-www).

6. Make sure post creation dates are easy to find.

7. Use full-text RSS feeds to get loyal users. partial feeds get more page views, but not as much love.

8. Don’t include the post date in your URL.

Google Forums Improvement

A big welcome to the Google Southeast Asia Solutions blog ( http://cse-sea.blogspot.com ) which is for all of our advertisers, partners, agencies, developers, and Google users in Southeast Asia.
This blog will prevent you from all kinds of Google myths and present you with relevant stuff for the Southeast Asia region working as a official blog from Google. The articles in this blog will help you to really understand Google products and technologies which can make big impacts on you and your online activities. You can get information beyond the product of advertising with AdWords and AdSense; and so you will find a lot here about Google Maps, Google Earth, OpenSocial, iGoogle, Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, and much much more.

Another big welcome to the Google's Asia Pacific Developer Blog. See how the web developers help to move the web forward and find out information about the latest event. Check out the new direction that Google want to lead the developers to go. In the near future, everybody might have their own customized search results due to the new project like SearchWiki etc. Check out the blogs for more information.

Google is making great improvement for their help forum. This video gives you a few more details on their latest changes:

How to Get Better Visibility on Google | Suggestion from Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts works for the Search Quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. Cutts also advised the public on how to get better website visibility in Google.(from Wikipedia)

Cutts ever said, "I'm not sure I would say ranking is dead but it's not as important as it used to be. The fact is the smart SEOs are not just necessarily looking at the rankings. They are looking at conversion, they are looking at their server log. It's great if you're ranking for a phrase but unless that leads to sales that doesn't help you very much."

"The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content and don't worry about 'can I show people that I rank number one for my trophy phrase.'"

Quality Score for Search Engine Marketing

The search engines (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) want two things to happen:

1. They want users to find what they're looking for.
2. They want advertisers to get site visitors whose intent that matches what's offered by the advertiser's site.

This way, satisfied users will return to the search engine for dependable search results, and advertisers can rely on a steady stream of clicks that result in conversions, and so keep spending advertising money with the search engine.

Years ago, in the early age of Search Engine Marketing, the search engines employed a pure auction system, whereby the highest-bidding advertisers gained the highest ad positions. While this seemed fair from the advertisers' perspective, it sometimes resulted in irrelevant ads appearing at the top of the search results page -- making it more difficult for users to find exactly what they were looking for.

So Google (followed later by Yahoo and Microsoft) decided to reward relevant advertisers (and punish irrelevant ones) by instituting the quality scoring system. With the quality score system in place, relvant advertisers may achieve higher ads position at an lower cost than irrelevant advertisers who are paying higher CPC.

The quality scoring system is based on a complex group and series of calculations that take into consideration the relationships among the words in keyword lists, in ad text and on landing page -- as well as many (possibly hundreds) of other factors that the search engines won't reveal, in order to reduce the likelihood that some advertisers will try to "game the system" and gain unfair advantage.

If your campaigns are having problems with their quality score, contact us at Webnatics for a free consultation!.

Frightening Webmastering Myths from John Mueller

Some people say to do SEO is easy thing. Everybody can do it.
So Everyone gets started somehow with:
* Keyword-stuffing
* Meta tags
* Submit & submit & ...
However the results are:
*nothing changed
*you wasted lots of time
Check out the top 10 myths as rated by a bunch of Googlers organized by John Mueller.

Increasing CTR for your Search Engine Marketing campaigns

Why is increasing CTR (Click Through Rate) important? CTR is a rough indication on how your campaigns are performing. A higher CTR in general means that the users that saw your ad found that it was relevant to what they were looking for.

CTR is only one of the indication of how your campaigns are performing and should not be the only KPI for your campaigns. This is a common misconception that new advertisers commonly make. A high CTR may only mean that the Adtext that the user saw seem relevant to his query. However, activities after user clicks on the ads cannot be tracked unless some sort of tracking tool was implemented. A free web analaytic tool to track user behaviour and clicks would be Google Analytics. It is a free tracking tool offered by Google to anyone.

Don't be mistaken, even with all my ranting, it is still crucial to improve your CTR. If you have defined a conversion in your campaigns, having a high CTR is an important stepping stone to increasing your conversion.

Here are some tips to improve your CTR:

• Using DKI in your adtext. However, keywords in your adgroups have to be carefully selected so that your ads will make sense and contribute to the effectiveness of your ads.
• Capitalizing the first character for all the words in your adtext. This will tend to make your ads stand out.
• Make sure your adtext and your landing page and website in general are speaking in the same frequency. Although this does not contribute directly to improving your CTR, users will tend to linger longer at your site. Long time = higher chance of a conversion.
• Test and measure different ad messenging. Have a few variants of ad text and set them to rotate evenly. After a few weeks or even days, you should be able to see what kind of ad messenging works and what does not. Cull the ineffective ad and run those that are working for that particular adgroup.

The above are just some basic tips to improve your campaign's CTR. If you require any assistance regarding your campaigns, please contact us at Webnatics. We provide free consulation!

SEO methodology: Best Practices for 404 errors

Having said so much about SEO, most of the time, technical, contents, links. It may surprise you 404 error can also affect your SEO or search engine ranking.

So from SEO perspective, why should be pay attention to 404 error? 2 main reasons, without a customised 404 error page for SEO, 2 possible actions, users may abandon their search, or search engine may think that this Site is not complete or still under construction, think that this Site is not worth of a high SEO ranking.

So what is the purpose to customize a 404 error page for SEO? 1st, it returns a correct code of URLs to tell users and search engine spider that the page they are seeking are not found, and you can also tell the users and search engine spiders what to do next. In SEO perspective, getting a higher ranking in SEO.

SEO for Universal Search

Before the introduction of universal search in the middle of 2007, SEO landscape had been very simple and straight forward.

So why is SEO for universal search important? 1st, most of the time, it stays on top of Search Engine Result page, 2nd, it requires no or lesser reading than text links, and I believe this might be a future of SEO.
So how do we SEO or optimize video contents for universal search?

· Relevancy is still the key, remember to optimize video contents, not your website
· Don’t be stingy on your video, share them; Post them on You Tube, getting user-initiated inputs are never great way to have your videos getting viral.
· Don’t limit to only you tube, there are lots of great sites out there, MySpace Video, AOL Video, and Metacafe are also another great Sites, post your video and contents just like what you do for you tube, increasing your presence in this sites will increase your chance of universal search for SEO
· Your video contents will go nowhere if nobody knows about it, promote it just like the way you links on your web contents for SEO.

Search engine marketing – Impression VS Clicks/CTR VS Conversions

In search engine marketing, Impression, Clicks or conversions, which is more important?

How you should view the most important metrics regarding your search engine marketing campaigns:
• Impression – this indicates the number of times your ads are shown, and this means the list of keywords you research, does it quantify the traffic or volume users are searching for?
• Clicks/Impression – this indicates how well your ads are written that encourage users to respond to your ads with regards to what they search for
• Conversion – this indicates how well your keywords, ad copies and landing page work together and encourage a user to act within your website, and if they do? This may mean a potential business lead to your company or getting another new customer to your business, and isn’t this what we want when we advertise?
In conclusion, is shall say, whenever we set up a Search engine marketing campaigns, everything start with traffic, so research a proper list of Keywords (1st step), write a good ad text to encourage users to respond to your ads (2nd step), and after you quantify your traffic, qualify your traffic and turn Clicks or visitors to a customers