I would like to apologise for the lack of post updates recently. Other than busying myself with work (office has been hectic recently), I am also creating a Search Engine Rank Position (SERP) checker tool for the website.

It is far from a finish product, but at least, it’s working already. You can check it out here.

A simple enough tool that queries the 3 main search engines, Google, Yahoo! and MSN (Live.com), for your websites SERP based on the corresponding keyword or keyphrase.

Hopefully, in-between the hectic schedule, family and personal time, I can complete the skinning by the end of the month.

Here’s a link to a list of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website.

The checklist has all the factors that affect your rankings with Google, MSN, Yahoo! and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist. Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to MSN, Yahoo! and all the other search engines of lesser importance.

Most people are a little paranoid on this issue. They think that linking out to other websites will leak PR value. You know what? Who cares! Really, it doesn’t matter if you are leaking out certain amount of PR.

Without links the web would have never existed. The absence of external links is unnatural - Unnatural enough to get Google’s attention to flag you aside for further algorithmic process.

Jus focus in delivering your product or service is a better alternative. After all, isn’t that what you are trying to achieve? Earn money. Yes, so link out to any website that you think is relevant in boosting that sales revenue instead of losing sleep over a couple of leak PR value.

LOL (Link out loud) - Proven by many in gaining that all important natural backlinks!

Browsing around late one night when I came across this small powerful utility. It’s called the “SERPs Finder”. Made by 4Neurons, a small software house based in Elblag, Poland.

4Neurons specializes in developing core components for wide range of software applications including internal algorithms for intelligent decision supporting systems, AI modules and graphic libraries for computer games and variety of security related components.

The SERPs Finder is one of their free tool given for download from their website, www.4neurons.com.

About the SERPs Finder

By coincidence, I was actually looking for such a tool for my daily SEO tasks. I wanted to save time by not going to a web-based version and have to actually wait for the page to load. I know it only takes up a couple of seconds for it to load, but still it bothers me.

Then by sheer luck, when I’m browsing casually, it just popped …read more…

Here’s a simple way of checking your Search Engine Result Page (or SERP in short) in Google. Copy the piece of code below into your browser address bar,

http://www.google.com/ie?q=keywords&num=100&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search

Replace the red colour text with your desired keywords. For example:

http://www.google.com/ie?q=search+engine+optimisation&num=100&hl=en&lr=&btnG=Search

then just use your browser search function (usually CTRL+F) to locate your website …and VOILA! Instant SERP checker.

Actually there are other more visually appealling checkers out there, such as Shoemoney’s or GoogleRanking, but I still prefer the manual way. Its much faster and you get to see your top and bottom few immediate competitors.

So, what’s your SERP ranking today? Try it out and see how it can work for you.

I was stumbling when I came across this article about “Guidelines for Selecting a Search Engine Optimized WordPress Theme”.  What caught my attention is the last part of his article.

…I use the footer of my blog for giving some sitewide link to a post I want to optimize.

To most part of it, I have to agree. Footers are a great segment of your website where you can place links that counts towards your ranking, yet still keeping the overall appearance to a clean minimum. It also reminds me of a website that I’m in-charge of where it uses its’ footer for important inbound key phrase linking.

The key is not to use it as a link-farm segment. That would totally violate any known SEO rule in the book. A good way however is to use it for inbound linkage. Here’s …read more…

For your everyday search queries, Google is still the reigning champion. However, if you are doing some keywords research for your website, you might want to use Yahoo! as a tool.

Enter your main search term in the Yahoo search box and click “Search”. You will be presented with additional choices underneath the search field. If you can’t see it, try expanding the down-arrow button to the left-bottom it.

You will see a few alternative search terms to the left of it. To the right of it, you will see a another section called “Explore concepts: your search term +”. (See image)

These are related key words or phrases that Yahoo! thinks is also relevant to your search. Your rich keywords bank! You can easily add any of these keywords into your article or site, whichever way you like it. The best of all, you …read more…

To continue on our discussion of SEO linking, lets’ touch on “bad crawlable links”. What is it exactly?

It is just pages or websites that are blocked with the robots.txt noindex meta tag, JavaScript redirected, blocked with the robots.txt file or a nofollow tag on your hyperlinks.

How to spot bad links?

View the page source code. If there is no robots tag, that’s good. Alternatively, if there’s a robots tag, do not fret. Check if there is a follow tag. Follow tags means your links are in good hands. It should look something like this:

<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

Also, check for JavaScript redirects on the page itself. Just hover your cursor over the link and look at the url that appears in the status bar at the bottom of your browser. If it shows you the correct link url, then it’s clean.

Checking …read more…

Why are diamonds, which most of us can get along quite well without, worth so much more than water, which is essential for life?

Those were the opening words of the second section in the book titled, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, written by David Friedman. It narrates the logic of economics and helps us apply it in our everyday lives. But, what has it got to do with SEO? A lot of it is… Let us take a look at this logic.

The Concept

The idea of price being equal to both the cost of production and value to us, was in fact decoded by our ancestors hundreds of years ago and is still in effect up till our modern age. And in SEO, it helps us understand the basic concepts of how we can influence the course of actions we should take in our …read more…

What is a Press Release? By official definition, it’s…

…formal printed announcement by a company about its activities that is written in the form of a news article and given to the media to generate or encourage publicity.

It’s a very effective way in getting you one-way traffic for your website without costing you hundreds of dollars in return. However, you need to follow a certain set of guidelines or your press release will never be published.

With Google’s current changes to reciprocal links value in their algorithm, one-way link such as press releases are becoming more valuable than ever. So, on this post, we’ll discuss some of the ways you can optimised it for maximum value.

Firstly, do not make your press release into an advertisement. It is not an ad copy. Remember it well or you’ll risk your press from not being published at all.

Keep your title and headings short and relevant.

Your …read more…