Optimind Technology Solutions, one of the fastest growing Philippine Web Design and SEO Company, is setting up a branch in Baguio and has opening for the following positions:

PR/Article Writer

Location: Baguio City, Philippines

Requirements:

• Candidate must possess at least a Bachelor’s/College Degree in Marketing, Journalism, Mass Communications, Advertising/Media, or equivalent.
• At least 1 year(s) of working experience in the related field is required for this position.
• Excellent skills in writing, must have written editorials, feature articles, press releases and photo captions.

Responsibilities:

• Write how-to, reviews and other useful articles for a wide variety of subjects
• Maintain 3-5 blogs on a weekly basis
• Build relationship with the blogging community by regularly commenting on related blogs and forums

Interested parties may send their resume to careers@myoptimind.com

For more information about optimind, please visit our website at www.myoptimind.com

As an SEO company, our goal is to increase the rank of the websites we handle on major search engines. One of the factors is link building. Because of increasing link spammers through comments on blogs and forum postings, most websites already include a nofollow tag. Adding a link on a site with nofollow does not help in increasing your website’s credibility but we are contemplating because it still brings traffic to the site (depending on how interesting your comments are).

We did a little bit of research on this and found out that Google and Yahoo actually still indexes the sites linked from a website with nofollow. You can read the rest from here.

Check out Website Grader to find out if your website is optimized for internet marketing (and seo of course).

myOptimind.com’s website grade is 91/100

For those who are into Social Media Marketing, this is a must read.

I was listening to Marketing over Coffee’s podcast on Search Marketing and they raised some points that will make you rethink your campaign:

• Being in position 11 is sometimes better than being on the 7th or 8th position
• The best positions will be 1-3, 10, and 11

For more information about our SEO services, please visit our website.

I found this helpful link through Smiley Cat’s Web Design Blog. The link basically provides you with a checklist so you won’t forget the important details in designing a website.

I just finished reading The New Rules of PR and Marketing by David Meerman Scott. The book is all about how to use online channels to reach customers and build media relations. Part of our Philippine SEO services is to do online promotions for our client’s company or product.  Some notes from the book that are useful for online promotions are:

• use rss feeds
• focus on keywords and phrases your buyers use
• add links to your news releases
• use the appropriate social media tags
• non-targeted, broadcast pitches are considered as spam
• pitch to bloggers and start your own blog (for more about blogging, you may read Janette Toral’s Blogging from home book)
• include an about page on your blog
• comment on blogs related to yours

In our company, we make sure that we don’t just create a fancy website design, we also consider the functionality and experience that it should offer to your customers. Here are some tips on website design based from Nielsen/Norman, Human Factors International.

1. Do not obstruct or compete with user’s critical tasks.
2. Present elements related to specific tasks based on frequency, importance or sequence.
3. Use buttons and links consistently. Always use the same label for the same function.
4. Pages should push no unexpected animation or sound at users.
5. Allow users to purchase without registering.
6. Lay out objects hierarchically to match the user’s expected task flow: left to right or top top bottom. Most users start by scanning the content area.
7. Ensure manageable page lenghts. Don’t use scrolling on home pages and make sure interior pages are fewer than 2.5 screens.
8. Ensure that pages can be easily printed and that printing does not cut off critical information. If this is not practical, provide a printable version.
9. Don’t design critical information os it looks like advertising.
10. Don’t force users to hover over something to see options.
11. Link names should communicate the content of the page they link to. Avoid generic links such as Click Here and More.
12. User your user’s vocabulary.
13. Write content that is short and simple, correct, in the active voice and interesting.
14. User bulleted lists, introductory summaries, clear titles, and stand-alone chunks to facilitate scanning.
15. Display a search box in the upper-right corner of every page.
16. Chunk search results into categories.

When submitting your website to directories, make sure that the directory is credible enough that it may not affect your Google page rank. The top directories that Search Engines trust are:

• Yahoo! Directory ($299 annual recurring fee)
• DMOZ (Free, but it takes time to get listed)
• Business.com
• BOTW ($99 annual recurring fee or $249 one-time review fee)
• JoeAnt (one time fee of $39.99)
  
• GoGuides

Before submitting to a directory, make sure to evaluate its quality. Try not to list under directories that:

• requires reciprocal link
• clones DMOZ
• has zero page rank (or clones its page rank)

Several clients have asked our guidance about the best type and size of font for their site.The answer is, there is no best type and size. Types are limited to certain fonts that are supported by the operating system (Mac, Windows or Linux). As for font sizes, the standard for web browsers would be 11px or 12px but that is just for web browsers. Nowadays, we have to cater to the iphone, pda, and other mobile devices.

Survey of supported font types

. Info sourced by Codestyle.

As you can see, only a few have 90% or more supporters. The recommended is to use the fonts with 90% or more installations. Other fonts maybe used using an image or a flash container.