Do-It-Yourself SEO Tips

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the Internet’s equivalent to the Yellow Pages. If your business website doesn’t show up in search engine results, you might as well not exist to millions of potential customers. Optimizing your website is a fairly straightforward process. Before you hire an SEO consultant, try doing these SEO strategies yourself.

Link Exchange

One of the most important factors that determine your search engine rank is the quality and number of sites that link back to your website. Your linkbacks determine how much authority your website has, and the number is assigned a rank relative to other websites in your niche or target market. To increase your site’s ranking and credibility, you need other websites relevant to your topic to link you.

Although link backs will help your site greatly, your SEO ranking will improve even more if the anchor text of the links contain keywords that are related to your website’s products or services. For instance, don’t ask for links with “click here” as the anchor text. Instead, ask your link exchange partners to use anchor texts like, “quality LCD monitors” or “cheap tickets”. Search engines give you more points by counting the linkback itself and the link’s reinforcement of your site’s importance.

Keywords

To get a high SEO ranking, you’ll need to pepper your content with appropriate keywords and phrases that you can use to promote your site. Don’t use broad, generic keywords like “cars” or “bags” - your site will only get lost in a sea of other websites on page 53 of Google’s results. You also don’t want to use keywords that are too narrow that very few people are likely to search for them.

The trick to coming up with the right keywords is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and think of what words they would use to search for your product. This means using “ordinary language” instead of industry lingo. If you’re not sure what keywords you can use for your site, you can use free online tools like Google’s Keyword Tool to help you figure out the most appropriate keywords. You can also use Google’s Traffic Estimator Sandbox to look for keywords with high customer demand.

Do not, however, stuff your site with too many keywords. Search engines become suspicious of websites that overdo keyword insertion. Your text copy or content should appear like a normal sales copy or a normal conversation. Ideally, the keyword density of your website’s content should be less than 15%. This means that for every 100 words on each page, you should not have more than 15 of these as your keywords.

Keywords in Images

Search engines can’t read graphics, but you can boost your website’s SEO impact using the images on your page. How? By titling and tagging them appropriately. This means renaming jpeg’s, gif’s, and all non-text files with names that include relevant keywords. For instance, a photo of a Honda Civic should be renamed from “honda-civic123b.jpg” to “honda-civic.jpg” if you want any SEO benefits related to the “Honda Civic” keyword. The alt tag is also a great place to insert keywords.

Transform your website into a Blog

Why Transform A Website Into a Blog?

So what possible reason would we have to transform a non-blog website into a blog-based website? After all, a blog is just another kind of website. What special advantages does the blogging model confer? Here are some reasons for making such a transformation:

1. Easy content management. Blogging systems are a specialized type of “content management system” (CMS) because they make it easy to create and update content. Many non-blog sites are managed by hand, which gets to be a pain when you have to update things like sitemaps (both the human-readable and Google-readable kinds), “what’s new” pages, menus, etc. A good CMS removes barriers to updating content, which is a good thing.

2. Better indexed content. There are directories and search engines who only deal with blogs and avoid non-blog sites. If you transform your site into a blog, you can get indexed/listed by these kinds of tools, i.e. Google Blogsearch.

3. Easy content syndication. Even though RSS and other content syndication formats predate blogs, many people associate them specifically with blogs. But you can create feeds for pretty much anything. Your non-blog site can have a “what’s new” feed that gets updated whenever you add content to the site. But if you have a blog, you get such automatically updated feeds with no effort.

4. Built-in interactivity. Readers can leave comments and trackbacks. You can even let (trusted) users contribute their own content.

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Paypal Bank Codes of Major Banks in the Philippines

One can now withdraw your Paypal funds into your Philippine Bank Account.

To complete your PayPal withdrawal, you will need to enter the name of your bank, your bank account number and the corresponding 9-digit bank code, which identifies your bank.
Check the official bank codes used for Paypal.

One has to be careful because if the code is wrong, a fine of 250 pesos will be charged.

To add your bank account , log in to PayPal, go to My Account > Profile > Add or Edit Bank Account then fill in the Bank Name, Account Number, and Bank Code.

Bank Codes
Check the Paypal Philippines Bank Codes

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Building An Online Home Business

This is a personal story success of an online home business. Maybe you might want to start one too. Here is her story.

Before I relate my experience of building an online home business, I feel it is so important at the outset to stress the fact that it takes time, patience, determination and a willingness to learn.

I am certain that the reason so many people get totally disappointed and disillusioned is because their expectations are far too high and they quit within the first couple of weeks or months when they have not made any money.

This is understandable because when we start an online home business we do so for the purpose of making money. Plus we expect to make money immediately. Unfortunately, it does not work like that – you have to go through the business building process before making money.

I started my online home business on the 28th April 2006. This was not my first attempt as I had previously joined many programs and wasted money because I had expected to make money quickly. Every program I joined required that I market my referral link and this was where I was failing. I realize now that I actually had no idea what internet marketing was all about and, I believe, it is the key to building a successful online business.

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How to build successful ecommerce sites

E-commerce has, for the most part, evolved far beyond the late 1990’s cliches of hair-wrenching, sanity-shattering slogs through yet another “clever” designer’s take on how shopping on the web should be. Standards prevailed, usability won out, and we’re now free to spend our collective $107 million (Census.gov e-commerce stats) per annum.

That said… It can still get better. Online shopping is in, if not infancy, at least a toddler stage. The advances that brought us here have made the process simpler and easier than ever, but some sites still haven’t caught on.

Since I’ve been doing an inordinate amount of online shopping recently (thanks to the theft last weekend and my upcoming lengthy trip to China), I feel uniquely qualified to share a few e-commerce site design tips - 17 tips, actually. Enjoy.

17 New Rules for Successful E-Commerce Websites