Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Web Design for Search Engine Optimization

Web Design is the first step of process to designing your website for search engine optimization.

After giving your Domain a name and a hosting service has been engaged, find a web designer with search engine optimization in mind.

You can either have your new website designed by a web designer or go and purchase a template online.

Some Tips to take note off.

Optimize your Banner image with description tag.

Optimize your Title and Header tags.

Optimize your Links.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

How to Optimize Websites for Search Engines?

How to optimize your website for search engines?

This is a good question for beginners and amateurs to internet marketing.

"I have been having a website for 6 months and I have been promoting some affiliate products. But I have not been making any sales from this website. I have not done any kind of promotion for this website either. I tried pay-per-click but it was not effective. What shall I do next?"

a. Putting up a website is an easy process. First find a product, think about a name for your domain and purchase this domain name. Next, find a web designer to design the website for you or buy a template and get the web designer to put in all the links.

If its an affiliate product, just get the affiliate code and put this link with your affiliate code in your blog or website to link directly to your affiliate program.

b. Submit your website to all the major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo. Read their Terms and Conditions as each operate on different algorithmns ie. different rules and regulation. Then wait.

P/S-Make sure you already have content in your website before you submit your site to search engines, at Submit Your Site, in major search engines.

c. Go and analyse your website's statistics via Google Analytics. You can plug in Google generated HTML codes in your website to track these statistic number.

d. You want to check if your pages in your website have been indexed or spidered by any of the search engines, especially Google.

Check them in Google SiteMap/Webmaster Tools.

You will get a report from Google telling you which pages have been indexed and which has not been. Problem may be from no internal links and so on.

e. Next, check for search engine optimization or search engine promotion. This means you are required to promote your website in related product category in directories.

Perform directory submission at this stage and other link building exercises.

Note: This is a long and time-consuming process. You may only see results in page rank from 2 weeks or 3 to 12 months, depending on what type of seo strategies used.

By this time, your website would be regarded as an older site that ranks rather highly, with traffic that runs into thousands daily and sales $$ also drops in daily for you.

Google Sitemap

Today in my search engine optimization course, we covered Google Sitemap.

What happens is Google's robots or spiders will go around websites that has been indexed either manually or by software submission.

When these spiders visit the website, they will go around the Home page and other linking pages to index any changes made in the content within the page.

It would be much easier if we help these spiders to go and visit this page that is called SiteMap of your website. In other words, the spiders just required to visit your website's SiteMap to index all the pages within this website, so it saves them time crawling all the pages in your site.

When spiders 'crawl' your website, it may be slowed down the loading processing time of calling your site up from the server.

This is an advantage of having a website with SiteMap.

File name extension would be - /sitemap.html

To check if Google has crawled to your site, check it out at Google SiteMap from this path or via Google Webmaster Tool at:-

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

A better way would also to create a /sitemap.xml to upload to your root directory in your server.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Search Engine Optimization - SEO Malaysia

This week I am attending a Search Engine Optimization course (or search engine promotion) and this course is given by a search engine optimization Indian expert who originates from New Delhi, India.

This SEO Malaysia course that I am attending in Kuala Lumpur was given at no charge as a courtesy from a good and generous friend of mine, Paul.

On day 1, which was yesterday, this SEO expert, Shiv Kumar exposes to us the concept behind 'web designing' and the work of a web designer, in general. He explains that during this initial stage of building a website for a client, we should start to build search engine optimize friendly pages on the working website.

Of course, prior to this, as a SEO expert, he has to sit down with the client to understand the needs and requirements of his client before he goes into the web design development.

Thereafter an agreement has been established between the SEO expert and the client, a website will be designed and built.

Web development would be considered 2nd stage, where the website go into further development. Internal and external links has to be established, checked and tested amongst other processes.

The 3rd stage and final stage comes after this, which is to optimize or promote this website and it is where the expertise of a search engine optimizer comes in.

This SEO expert has explained clearly that many website owners who are not familiar with pay-per-click or PPC, would be spending lots of wasted money that was not effective in driving traffic to their website.

Therefore, search engine optimization or SEO is a more efficient way to optimize websites via natural raking and hopefully to appear in the first 10 pages from the browser search in Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines.

Search engine optimization intervention by a SEO expert is necessary for any websites which are between 6 months to a year old and for site owners who are not seeing monetary returns for their current websites, are most appropriate.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Bangkok's Way of Double Parking in Shopping Malls

There were a number of Thai practices that impresses me but there was one particular practice that truly out beat the rest.

It is double parking in busy shopping malls over the weekends.

In our country when we park our cars, it is only normal to park side by side to other cars and having another car at the back of our car. This is to ensure the front or back bay car parked can drive in or out with ease.

In Bangkok, they practice the same way except that other cars can park in front of you with their car facing a one way direction. Either facing right or left. And you have to leave your car's gear on Neutral.

Why is this?

It is because when you leave your car gear on Neutral, car owners can push to move your car front or backwards to enable them to get out of their car park space at the end of their shopping spree.

This method is practice because there aren't enough car park spaces in all shopping malls in Bangkok over the weekend and this is a perfect solution.

And I found Thais to be very patient and cooperative with this system of parking their cars.

No one vents their anger or showed impatience when they need to get their car out of the way.

I do not even see scratches on their cars.

This practice certainly impresses me!





Sunday, December 03, 2006

Back from Holiday in Bangkok

I am back from my year-end holiday in Bangkok, feeling totally exhausted.

Why?

Because there was much walking around in the heat of the sun and pollution level in Bangkok from the streets were high.

However, I discovered most Thais do not speak or write in English and there were not many internet cafes around. At least not where I was staying at on Phaya Thai Road at Pathumwan Resort condominium.

I have also discovered many businesses in Thailand do not own websites and broadband facilities in their home or in business is low in penetration.