SEO Pinoy – Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing

Just last week I’m looking for an Ipod that I will give to my sister as a gift for her graduation. Because I’m very busy to go to the mall I look to purchase online. It came to my mind to try to buy on Ebay.ph. If you’re not familiar with Ebay.com, it is a portal where you could sell different products online and some other stuff you own (new/old). I don’t really know how much Ipod cost. So I search Ipod on the website and found some. The first is Ipod 2nd generation BIN Price is 2000php. So I thought it’s a bargain that’s why I took the BIN price. So I contacted the seller. But after talking to him I saw later that the post was edited and he stated that this is 99.9% like the original Ipod (Made in China) . Now I’m disappointed. I told the seller that I would contact him later this week. Also on that same day I bid on an Ipod Nano which the highest bid is around 2,450 php and so I bid for 2,750 php. And the next 2 days ebay sent me an email telling that I won the auction. And I’m so excited that I won the auction I contact the seller via SMS. Then he told me he will call me back on my landline. I gave her my landline. The conversation goes like these.

Me: Hello
Seller: Hi, this is the seller of the Ipod nano( I wouldn’t mention her real name)
Me: Hi, good evening.
Seller: Have I deal with you before?
Me: Nope, Why?
Seller: Because my old account have been deleted on Ebay for few times now.
Me: Oh ok, Why they delete it?
Seller: Because they don’t want people selling “not original” Ipod.
Me:(confused) Oh ic
Seller: I just want to remind you that this is not original Ipod.
Me: So what is the difference between the the original and your product?
Seller: My product is much better because it has more features than the original. Does the original Ipod has video and radio?
Me: Really, Ok I’ll just contact you later this week because I’m working during weekdays.
Seller: Ok, just contact me when you will get it. Atleast 2 days before so that I could get the product.
Me: Ok, sure. Thanks

-End of the conversation-

The moral of the story is make sure you’re buying the original one. I have no plans of buying the product because it’s against my principle to buy these type of products. So I guess I’ll just leave a message to them that I’m not interested anymore because the product is not what I’m looking for. I hope they would not leave me a negative feedback in Ebay.ph. I’ve heard few pirates are selling fake products lately. My friend has just told me (because he’s a guitarist and loves collecting guitars) there are lot of fake guitars that are being sell in Ebay.ph Now I’m afraid about implementing PayPal in Ebay.ph because you might get lot of fake products. Jeezzz… But anyway I hope this will serve as a warning who wants to try ebay.ph. I’m just lucky that these people told me the truth about their product before selling it.

Lately many blog marketing is being used by the SEO around the world. It’s because contextual links are much powerful than text links. Because Search Engines are now tracking the buying/selling of links. And blogging is now the way to gather incoming links for a site and also it gives keyword rich anchor text which is very search engine friendly. Not to mention blogs are being indexed fast rather than a regular website. Why advertise on blogs? Simply because it’s the best right now and you will get permanent links from a blog post.

Blogging is now becoming a trend. Another way to advertise, market, earn in the internet. In order to earn from blogging you must first establish your blog and get as many incoming links for your blog in order to increase your link popularity and search engine rankings. This means the higher the traffic, the higher the chances that your blog will be chosen by the advertiser. And also if your Blog become popular, many people will link to you voluntarily and gain higher PageRank which is one of the criteria of the advertiser. Also if you have many content you will have page indexed which is one of the things advertiser is looking for. The higher the indexed pages the more trust you will get from advertiser that your site is a quality blog.

If you’re tired of checking your Google PageRank one by one here’s the tool for you in order to check the PageRank of your website. Try it to make your job easy try Bulk PageRank Checker

This is one of the hardest part in starting a website. There are two types of visitors namely organic and referral. Organic visitors are the traffic you’ll get from SERPs and referral are traffic you will get from other websites that has link to you either from advertising or they just love to link to your website. In order to get more traffic you need some strategic planning thoughts that will be tackle on my next post. With the rapid growing of competition you must be able to manage on how to be on top above the rest.

As part of starting a website you need to choose the best hosting company for you. All of us are looking for cheap and reliable web host. And I just want to give some advice on whats the best hosting packages out there. But don’t worry the title of the blog will be discussed later on this blog post. SEOPinoy your free SEO tips & case studies blog is here to tackle about the right hosting packages for you.

Currently I’m using both HostGator Baby package shared hosting ($9.95) and Godaddy Deluxe Plan shared hosting ($6.99). On both hosting they offer 100 GB Space and 1,000GB of bandwith. There is only two diffence between them. The price and the cPanel. Godaddy offers cheaper price but the cPanel features which we are very familiar with, is not available on Godaddy. Traffic stats on Godaddy is not that good looking as well.(They don’t have Awstats) . They offer good traffic stats manager but not for free. So I was thinking if I just switched to HostGator since all the space and bandwith I’m looking for is on HostGator now. But the price is not the same though. Also I heard some horror stories from former clients of HostGator. They said that HostGator sometimes will just shut down your hosting because of some violation that they’re not aware of. So I have to choose between them that’s why I have two hosting account currently. But as the old saying “Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket” so I guess I have to stick on these two hosting account.

Also if you want to look for alternatives search it in Google, there are lot of good and detailed reviews on different webhosting company out there. And get back here if you found something that is much better than Godaddy and Hostgator hosting.

Here are some of the Godaddy promo codes I’ve used on Godaddy:

OYH1 – 10% off on any order.
OYH2 – $5 off from any $30 order or more
OYH3 – In case you want to register a domain for just $6.95/year use this code.

If you want to save $9.94 from your Baby Hosting Packages which is BTW $9.95 you’ll just have to spend $0.01 from your Paypal account or Credit Card. Not bad right? It seems like you have free 1 month hosting. I don’t know if this can be avail again by the same Paypal account or individual. I’ll try again if I can get away with it. LOL

HostGator Coupon Code: JURY, hgc25, hostgator, freetrial, iceishot, MUSICA

So it’s really no risk if you will use HostGator Hosting Packages.

While searching for the best Google keyword/s suggestion tool I’ve found Google Zeitgeist. In these tool you can find the most searched keyword sorted by country. A very useful tool for webmaster who want to build a website based on the popularity of a niche.

What makes an SEO a good SEO is probably if you could build quality links to your client. Because quality links is much better than quantity links.

Examples of Quality links

- Relevant niche
- One-way links not reciprocal links
- Backlinks is ranking in SERP for a particular keyword relevant to niche
- Your link must not be in page that looks like link farm.
- Your link must be SEO friendly. Meaning it’s a plain link to your site not redirect and/or with “no follow”.

- SEO Pinoy -

I called this post as PR update Part 2. Just noticed that my web directory is now PR4. Yes, check again your PR0 website and you will see changes on your PR if your expecting an increase in PR of your site. I thought Google change already their algorithm. So the formula for PR is still the same. If you have few PR7 and PR6 link the chances that you will get is PR7, PR6, and PR5 is absolutely 100%. Oh BTW, check also your inner pages because its part of this PR update thats happening now.

This is basically a quick heads up to check again your PageRank. Goodluck to all PR addict there.

I thought of this topic to be interesting especially for SEO beginners/newbie on what is the first step after setting up your website.

First you need to be able to expose your website to the major search engines. There are two ways to do these. It’s either let the search engine discover your website via link from other website. Preferably Website with high PageRank. Or submit your website to the search engines.

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html (You must have a Yahoo account before you can submit your sites URL)

MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Inktomi Search Index (powered by MSN): http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Second you need to submit your website to as many as you can web directories out there paid or free. Be sure you submit your site to DMOZ.org and Yahoo.com (free/paid). You can read more on how to submit your website to web directories here . This will increase your link popularity and exposure to Search Engines to crawl your website often.

Last year 2006, there was sudden increase of the popularity of directories because many seo/webmasters think that Directories our good way to get one-way links in very cheap price and some are free. Because of this exploit some directory owners thought of creating many directories to earn from this directories. What happen next is most of the directories today are somewhat useless now because they do not review all the submissions if they are quality websites or not. This depreciate the value of directories. Directories are popular before because they provide useful resources for people searching for quality websites that don’t appear in search engines.

Just a reminder if you want to create your own directory be sure you will be approving links according to the quality of the website not because to increase the volume of links in your directory or they pay for the listings. If you’re looking for directories and directory categories here are some list of quality web directories that you might want to look at http://www.dmoz.org and http://dir.yahoo.com

Directories are usually compose of main category Arts, Business, Computers, Health, Recreation, Regional, Society, Sports, World. Among these categories the popular
sub/categories are travel, Entertainment, sports, internet, and finance links.

You can use site-sift directory script if you’re new with coding and designing your new directory. I recommend Site-Sift because they are seo-friendly and user-friendly as well especially on part of the owner of the directory that are new to directory management.