Long holidays are the best times to review and plan your next strategy. While your competitors are relaxing and away on vacation, work on your strategy and execute them before your competitors go back to work.

One of the things you should reflect on is your website (since the web is almost the best marketing channel you’ve got). Below are some review pointers for your website:

• Are you getting the right inquiries from your website?
  Or are you even getting any? If you’re not, you might want to check your web statistics. It usually comes with your hosting package or you can install Google Analytics on your website for free. If you are getting decent visits to your site and not getting inquiries, you might want to look at the content and the layout if its designed for conversion and if you are following usablity principles.
• Is the information on your site updated?
  Its a common problem for corporate websites to display outdated contact information on the site. Check if all your current promotions and service/product rates are updated. Check if your external links still exist.
• Is your website cross-browser compatible?
  You maybe a Mac guy like me and loves using safari to surf. Unfortunately, everyone has different preferences. So your website should be tested on all major browsers: Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. Most of the time, javascript validations and variable layouts cause browser incompatibility issues. If your website’s contact form turned out not to work on a certain browser, chances are you might loose some valuable leads from your website.
• Are you mobile-ready?
  Its not just getting ready for mobile phones, its getting ready for different types of mobile devices. With the invention of the iPhone and with WiFi everywhere, chances are some people will be surfing using smaller browser screens. Just make sure your website still looks and functions the same even on smaller screens like Safari on iPhone. Most modern web and mobile browsers can display the sites correctly as long as it is forming a valid XHTML. You can use a W3C validator tool to check if your site is valid.
• Can your website be found on search engines?
  This is the most important point you should consider. If your website cannot be found by people looking for your products or services online, then it doesn’t serve its purpose (marketing-wise). Try researching about SEO or hire an SEO company to do the work for you.

This morning, my seo manager pointed me to a post about using blog comment spamming techniques as part of an seo campaign. My company handles the seo for the mentioned website - flowers express ( a site that sells and delivers flowers to the philippines) - together with other LBC websites. I would like to apologize to Abe Olandres of Yugatech again for any problems my team would have caused him and would also like to thank him for raising this issue. I wouldn’t have found out about us using generic comments if it weren’t for this post. In the first place, if comment spamming is my goal, I would’ve just purchased a software to make it automated and not hire 10 people to do this.

With this said, we are trying to find out more ethical ways to do SEO. As much as we want our blog comments not to be tagged as spam, they will still look like spam because we’re using keywords as the blog commenter’s name.

Rest assured, we are hardly working on this issue and have already implemented stricter rules in blog commenting for our campaigns.

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

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 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

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)

Here in the Philippines, most of the businesses are just starting to go online. Since we started in 2002, most of our clients are usually from overseas with US and Singapore being the majority.

Yesterday, I’ve met with a businessman who owns a local travel agency and is now willing to expand his market using a web channel. One of his questions was how to get people into his website. I gave him the following online marketing tips:

• Use Pay-per-click (PPC) while SEO is underway.
  With the current trends on Search engine optimization (SEO), it will take a longer time for new websites to rank up higher in the search results. While waiting for your site to climb up the ranking, it will be better to implement a PPC campaign to get traffic for your new website.
• Join the online community.
  Interact with people on social networks like Facebook, Friendster, Myspace, etc. and be involved on forum topics that are related to your business. This will make it easier for the market to know about you. Check out Optimind’s Social Media Optimization (SMO) services.
• Reward your visitors and customers.
  Implement a rewards system or give your customers or visitors prizes whenever they buy or refer someone to your website

For more information on how to promote your website, please check out our SEO and SMO services.

Recently, we’ve redesigned our corporate website. The current site is not yet final as we are still lacking some pages for our new services. I am personally working on the content structure and decided to outsource content production to my favorite copywriter. (You can find our old website here)

The main objective for this revamp is to increase our search engine ranking and our conversion rate. So far, so good. Although we are already ranking on the top 5 spots for keywords like web development philippines and seo philippines on Google, Yahoo and MSN, I noticed a big drop on web design philippines keyword (from rank #10 to spot #26, we’re back to #10 spot today but still hoping for #1).

While fixing our drop ranking problem, I noticed that a lot of our client demo websites are being crawled by Google and appears on search results. To fix this problem, I had to create a robots.txt (which I thought was unimportant).

Robots.txt are used by search engine crawlers to check on which directories and files should and shouldn’t be indexed. In-depth explanation on how it works can be found on the robots.txt website.

You can create the file using any text editor and just upload it to the root directory of your website. The basic stuffs that you should know (the ones I used to block some directories from being crawled) are User-agent and Disallow.

sample content of a robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /d*
Disallow: /name_of_directory/
Disallow: /name_of_filename.file_ext/

on the User-agent line, you may specify the crawler name (e.g. googlebot) or just use * for all crawlers. On the disallow line, you have to specify the names of the directory of files that you don’t want crawlers to index. Disallowing d* (Disallow: /d*) tells the crawler not to index all directories that starts with the character d.

You may find additional information on how you can improve your robots.txt on the Google Webmaster page.

I am currently blogging at Cordillera Cofee in Riverbanks. They provide free and fast Wi-Fi access and good food and coffee!