Nowadays, even the smallest company uses the Internet as a main tool in building a customer base, keeping in contact with their clients and this is also their most basic means of advertising.

Designing a company website is cheap and effective, not to mention essential because the world wide web is the only medium that offers instantaneous information access to millions of users around the globe.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the key towards building an effective website that would get a lot of hits and visitors. A website that nobody visits is useless so the challenge lies in leading Internet users to visit your website.

Thus, your website need to be “found” when users type in keywords in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, AOL and others.

Once a keyword relating to the products or services that you offer is keyed into a search engine, a direct link to your website should emerge on top of the list.

You should employ search engine optimization techniques to lead traffic your way, and get more hits that would later on lead to more profit for your company, which is your goal in the first place.

Here are some search engine optimization tips on how you can make it to the top of the list of search engines and use your SEO techniques to benefit your website and your company:

SEO Technique 1: If you have an existing website and domain, just optimize the one that you currently have instead of purchasing a new domain.

It will take some time before your website will show up in a particular search engine, like Google, so it better to use the one that you currently have instead of switching to a new one.

SEO Technique 2: Know who your target audience is and aim for them.

If you are in the manufacturing industry and a user types in your product in a search engine, then you would immediately have your target right in front of you.

As soon as the user hits the Enter button or clicks on ‘Search’, then the person will be lead to your website.

Make sure that your target market will get ‘hooked’ on your website. Once the search engines show the link to your website, their job is done.

What you should do next is to make sure that your visitor will not leave your website without them trying out your products or services, or at least leaving some pertinent information so that you can contact them in the future for marketing and advertising purposes.

When hitting a particular target market, learn about their interests, location and age to have an idea of what you can offer them in return.

Also, you can somehow link their interests to your products and services.

SEO Technique 3: Search for the right keyword.

You should be creative, persistent and flexible when looking for the keyword or keyword phrases to use in optimizing your website.

Google and Yahoo offer some SEO tips and tools on how you can come up with keywords that will yield results.

Do not settle for just one keyword. You can also vary the words and phrases that you use for each page on your website so that you can have more hits.

SEO Technique 4: Consider your target market when designing your website.

The design itself would include the general theme of the website. You should also pay attention to smaller details such as color and font style and size.

Make sure that the website is user-friendly and do not forget to insert helpful articles, tips, hints and related links that can be shared to other users.

It is a good thing to have an option to send a link or an article to a friend, which will add more users and increase your client base.

There should also be various ways to browse through your website, to fit each user.

A person might find it to difficult use the scroll down option so you should also provide hyperlinks which are accessible to them.

SEO Technique 5: Concentrate on the website content.

Regularly update the content of your website so that old and new users can find something new when browsing through your website.

Make the content brief and precise. Writing a content which has more than 600 words will make the users lose interest, since most of them do not actually read but just skim through the text. *Don’t take SEO too much into account: your visitors should come first!

Strive to be the best and most comprehensive website and you will make your mark when it comes to information about the products and services that you offer.

It helps a lot to pay attention to detail, too .

Finally, keeping your website’s content updated is a must (first, to keep your readers reading and second, for SEO purpose).

Spread the word about your website and use these basic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and you will surely gain positive results once users visit your website.

Thus, end my rambling on “5 Essential SEO Techniques in Building a SEO Website.” For more SEO techniques, please check out the SEO Techniques category.

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Some quick definitions of “Subdomain” and “Subdirectory”:

A subdomain is a completely different website (from the ‘main-domain’) and it looks like this, “http://subdomain.main-domain.com”.

*Note–For ease of clarification, I’ve used ‘main-domain’ instead of ’site-domain’ as the Top Level Domain (TLD): e.g. main-domain.com or Top-Level-Domain.com

The URL of a subdirectory looks like this: “http://main-domain.com/subdirectory.”

Search engines see subdirectory just that–subdirectory of the website’s domain. Basically, what that means is that the subdirectory belong to the site’s main domain or subdomain, which again is a different website from the ‘main-domain’.

So, if the main-domain has high page rank (PR), the page rank gets distribute throughout the subdirectories within the main-domain; but the subdomain does NOT, however, feel the PR love from the main-domain . This is, again, because the subdomain is a different website from the main-domain.

O.K. Now that we’ve gotten the subdomain/subdirectory definitions down, let’s go back to the question of whether a subdomain name or a subdirectory name is best fitted for your SEO blog.

To simply put, if you have have a main-domain site about cat, “www.cat-domain.com,” and you want to create a blog on “cat food,” then you should choose “cat-food” as a subdirectory for your SEO blog, “www.cat-domain.com/cat-food.” This is because “cat-food” is related to your ‘main’ website topic, so your subdirectory SEO blog will feel ‘more’ PR love from your ‘main-domain’.

On the other hand, if you want to create another site for “dog-food,” you should choose “dog-food” as a subdomain of the “cat-domain.com,” since “dog-food” has little relevance to your main-domain site, www.cat-domain.com.

And because a subdomain is a different website, you can actually have a subdirectory-blog in the subdomain (e.g. subdomain.main-domain.com/subdirectory-blog).

So, if you want an SEO blog out of the subdomain, you can have “luxury-dog-food” as a subdirectory name: “http://dog-food.cat-domain.com/luxury-dog-food”. And yes, if you have high PR for the subdomain “dog-food,” your SEO blog on “luxury-dog-food” also feels the PR love from your SUBDOMAIN, but not from your main “cat-domain.com”.

And that’s concluded my rambling on subdomain vs. subdirectory for an optimized SEO blog .

Anyway, to recap, if you have a blog topic (“cat-food”) that’s related to your main-domain website (“http://cat-domain.com”), for SEO purpose, you should choose the subdirectory route: cat-domain.com/cat-food. But if your blog is of different topic than your main-domain website (“dog-food”), you should choose “dog-food” as a subdomain name for your SEO blog: dog-food-blog.cat-domain.com.

O.K. Now, I really am finished rambling about the subdomain and subdirectory dilemma .

*Of course, you still need links (and other factors) to be able to rank in the SERP .

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• First SEO Report for My SEO Blog
• What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Wow. I’ve been extremely busy perfecting my other sites + preparing for the US citizenship test, and whatnot (yeah, I’m kinda ‘unmotivate’ to be going through the long-winded application process–until now that is . But I’m here and happily reporting on my SEO blog performance so far =P.

So far, there are only 17-20 entries for this blog, but it is getting an average of 30+ 50+ visitors per day (most of it is from Google Digg and StumbleUpon, since Yahoo and MSN have just recently decided to index my blog .

O.K. Here’s a little more details for the report:

Google Index: 219 Pages? (probably from past articles that I’ve removed
Yahoo Index: 41 Pages
MSN: 67 Pages

Alexa Rank: 536,621
Link: don’t know Yahoo is doing something with this.
LinkDomains: don’t know either Yahoo is doing something with this.
*(Sure I can check it from other tools, but my blog is kinda small right now, so I’m not worry about checking these stats).

Anyway, that’s it for this SEO report. Until the next time…

Oh, by the way, I’ll be continued doing this series of SEO report for this blog in the future. So, if you don’t want to know my random reports on these stats, please let me know; else I’ll going full blast with this–because I’ve always liked stats–especially SEO stats–and you should too .

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I’m sure many of you (presumably bloggers) out there have heard about the Digg Revolt from the hacked DVD encryption keys, but can you believe it: now LiveJournal decides to taunt its user by mass deleting not just discussion posts but also *their users accounts and community groups!

*(You’ve gotten to read the news source closely when they said LJ action “lead” to the deletion of the accounts, which is explained below).

This massacre of the user-generated contents and ‘the users’ apparently includes the “removal of literary critiques and fan-written fiction about Harry Potter.”

You can check out CNN news for the complete coverage of this digbacle (debacle .

In the meanwhile, I’ll wait and see how Six Apart, owner of LiveJournal, TypePad, MovableType, and a host of other things responses. (I’m pretty sure it’s not going to be the undo route, cuz I don’t think you can ‘un-deleted’ the accounts or mend the ego/id of their thousands customers.

But come on LJ, I understand that they’re (ab)users of your site – but still, aren’t they still your “users”? Where is the warning LJ?). Maybe I should go back and re-read all those Harry Potter books that were ‘locked’ in my lit sister closet to see if there’s really a sex theme in there .

Update. Here’s the official apology from Barak Berkowitz, the chairman of Six Apart (which owns live journal):

“Well we really screwed this one up…”

His words not mine . Here’s is his post on LiveJournal’s DigBacle. (Also, it turns out that they ‘only delete the community groups + discussions’ and only ’suspended’ the accounts: the users delete them in protests .

Hmn. I’m left wondering–when will they learn to ‘announce/sample’ their action before going at it with full blast? Anyway, enjoy the public humiliation . (Wow! Still unbelievable – 2 social upheavals/cracks in a very short period of time: I guess Six Apart needs more time to learn about the Diggbacle .

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LOL. You shouldn’t even ask that question =P. For one thing, it’s BLACK HAT! For other, well, let me first ‘introduce’ to you why people spam .

Perhaps very few things can illustrate ‘fierce’ competition as vividly as the “Web” and SEO. After all, how can one website compete with thousands of other websites ‘just like itself’–without any search engine optimization?

If the attention span of an average Internet user is as expansive as a search engine’s listing, then there’s nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, though, that is not the case. Very likely, a person conducting a search on the Internet will probably just browse through the top 3 to 5 SERPs (search engine results pages) and stop there. Website that get buried in the 10th page and onwards will probably not get too much attention if certain measures are not undertaken.

Those measures, of course, are search engine optimization (SEO). Experts in this field perform certain procedures which may be seen a “website boot camp” to get your website into fighting form that will compete in the top rankings of a search engine.

However, as it is with almost everything else, some shortcuts exist that are able to “cheat” search engines into placing a particular website at a high ranking, despite the fact that it offers no real information. These sets of shortcuts are called “spamming”.

SEO spam (spamming the search engine index or spamdexing) is a set of ‘black-hat’ SEO techniques that manipulate a website for the purpose of creating an unrealistic boost in its rankings on SERPs. Here are just some examples of black-hat SEO techniques used to spam the living heck out of the search engines. (Warning: Do not do this on your web-estate or any where!)

Black-Hat SEO Technique 1. Cloaking
When a website presents a set of information to a search engine different from a set the user is seeing, then cloaking has been done. What usually happens is that the web page’s code is relevant to the user’s search keywords, but when the user visits that particular web page, he user sees a document that has little or nothing to do with his search.

Black-Hat SEO Technique 2. Artificially Networked Sites
There is really nothing wrong with creating links between one site to another so long as the links are relevant and serve to connect useful information.

However, spammers who perform this black-hat SEO technique set up several web sites and link them together even the sites contain no real and useful information. The purpose for doing so is simply to create the illusion of a highly referenced site because of its density of links. If this is the case, then it can be considered spamming.

Black-Hat SEO Technique 3. Blog and Forum Spams
Online blogs and forums are a great source of information since it these formats are built to be updated within short intervals. This, in itself, what makes it a good reference for information, which is why search engines like to visit these sites and rank it well for the quality of information it holds.

However, spammers have taken advantage of this by flooding blogs and forums with irrelevant links to the websites they want to generate artificial ranking for. Not only are they cheating the search engine company by misleading a user to irrelevant information, they also interrupt the bloggers and the forum participants, which is downright rude.

Black-Hat SEO Technique 4. Hidden Text.
Similar to cloaking, hidden texts are meant to make search engines think that a page is about one thing, while it is actually about another. But it fools the search engine this way: the text that the search engine is able to reads is camouflaged by making the text font color the same as the background. What happens is that the user is unable to read what the search engine saw, and therefore may be looking at a document that is not related to the user’s search.

There are other black-hat techniques, too, but I don’t want to give you any wrong impression. O.K. O.K. Some other techniques are to create small, imperceptible links that a user can accidentally click on, thus generating more hits for a website even if the user had no intentions of visiting that site at all.

O.K. I hope you’re happy with ’some’ of those black-hat SEO techniques (not all of them!?! .

Anyway, by this time, you probably already know why people are spamming. It is basically a shortcut used by some “unscrupulous” website owners to make their website rank high on SERPs (with a high potential of getting their sites BANNED in the future by the search engines), or by some self-proclaimed SEO experts who use these spammy black-hat SEO techniques to get the arms and legs of their customers for doing little to no work .

BTW–now that you know who they are, and how they do it, here’s why you should not be tempted to the dark side and use these black-hat techniques for nothing than spamming:

1. The whole point of the Internet was to create a wealth of information that everyone can access and add to. The whole idea was to be able to create a place where information can be created and shared with others so that it can foster understanding without any physical boundary. Other results of this information have led to the development e-commerce and online businesses, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It still contributes to a community of information and sharing.

2. Spamming is fundamentally profiting at someone else’s expense. A spammer profits by using other people to make his website rank higher than others without taking the necessary time and effort to make his website useful and relevant as what others have done.

3. It speaks poorly of website owners who see nothing but their own bottom lines in using the Internet. It is basically exploiting the trust and the willingness to share, which made the Internet such a promising venue for everyone.

4. Finally, it demeans honest ‘white-hat’ SEO experts (like me ) who take the time and effort to produce quality website and make it a point to follow the rules. Search engine marketing is helping to level the playing field so it can allow businesses of any to advertise right along side each other. And that is a commendable thing, which everyone should gladly support.

5.*Note to the spammers/black-hat SEOers: search engines, with billions of dollars at their disposal, are ALWAYS developing smarter technologies to detect spamming and black-hat SEO techniques in order to give users the best list of information from the Internet. Eventually, the black-hat/spamming techniques mentioned above may be eliminated. (Unfortunately, it is very likely other more sophisticated ones will come up).

On your part, you can report spammers to these search engines when you encounter them. The more people like you who do this, the easier it will be to apprehend these cheaters and make it more difficult for spammers to ‘perform’ their black-hat SEO rituals .

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You get free lunch, free pool, free games, free everything at Google – sounds like a vacation to me rather than work . And, yes, probably the ‘best’ thing about it is: it’s FREE! (Employees only though =)

*Things to take note: treat your employees right and they will return the favor (and make you billions richer ).

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• Using Mod-rewrite to Redirect Non-www URL to www URL

Update 1: It’s definitely the WP-Cache…Arg…Warning: it will change your WordPress core files!!!

Here are some helpful comments I got from a few of my fellow forumers’ posts:

“Beware of wp-cache. Many strange things have happened to blogs with that plugin installed. It might be better now since it’s been some time since I looked at it”
–Fellow Forumer 1

“The ‘headers already sent’ means there is some errant white space or typo somewhere in your code; best place to look is on line 86 in the seth godin plug-in. It’s likely not the MySQL table you installed.”
–Fellow Forumer 2

This is the error message that appear at the top of the header:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/seoblogger/public_html/wp-config.php:2) in /home/seoblogger/public_html/xxxxxx/xxxx/what_would_seth_godin_do.php on line 86

Update 2: I took the liberty to UPGRADE it to newest version of WordPress, WordPress 2.2 =P. Took about 10 minutes but it works out–o.k. for now .

Update 3: Everything is back to normal =P. Now, I’ll just have to upgrade the other sites …And I too know what’s wrong with the older version of WordPress. With the new version you have an ‘integrated’ widget file, so you don’t have to use the Widget Sidebar plugin, plus the ‘Preview’ at the bottom of the ‘Write’ area is taken out and replaced with a ‘Preview’ link on the upper right hand corner of the screen (but why took it out when I can use the Clutter Free Plugin to remove it + other ‘cluttering’?).

Here’s How I Trouble-Shoot This Problem:

I fixed this problem by upgrading to the newest version of WordPress (WordPress 2.2), since I think the WP-Cache change some ‘core’ files of the WordPress (don’t know which).

And yes, the pain of following the not-so-detail installation instruction at the WP-Cache website was unnecessarily ‘painful’!

I know the Related Post Plugin isn’t a problem because I have used it on my other sites.

After this experience and other near d(r)ead experiences from WordPress and third party plugins and WYSIW you don’t get editor, I humbly suggest fellow bloggers who use WordPress to BACKUP ALL YOUR DATA before activating a plugin!

And also, try to set up your blog with all the plugins as soon as possible, because you don’t want your blog to look ‘discombobulated’ when you have 1000+ visitor a day. Then, again, you might want to test ‘new thing’ on another site once you have that many reader .

*Note to yourself: when attempting to use/activate ‘just’ a plugin, BE SURE TO BACK-UP ALL THE DATA!

By the way, here’s a database managing plugin I use: WP-DBManager

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And no, I did ‘NOT’ mean the title to rhyme with ‘Firefox’ =P. But come on, I’m still wondering why so many Internet Explorer (I.E.) users don’t switch to Firefox ? (Please let me know if you have such reasons).

For one thing, if you’re browsing with the virus-prone Internet Explorer, you will ‘probably’ get tons of discombobulated pictures of gazillions of websites due to ‘browser incompatibility’ (mine included .

O.K. I may sound biased, since my sites aren’t looking too pretty in I.E.–but it’s true.

So, below I’ll give you–my fellow visitors who are still using the so-named I.E.–a list of 7 reasons why you should change to Firefox ASAP:

1. Firefox is very up-to-date and is extremely secure for browsing the web: Firefox automatically tells you what to download when there’s a security update. With I.E….what can I say: how many times have I/you gotten viruses, adwares, spywares, ect from using it? Why is it so? It’s because I.E. is the product of Microsoft, and because Microsoft has long established itself as the big CORP, you would understand that many have tried to successfully hack the living out of I.E.
2. With Firefox, you have ‘targeted’ pop-up blockers. With I.E., it’s a COMPLETE opposite. Just take this message from I.E. for example: “You’re about to view pages over a secure connection. Any information you exchange with this site [Yahoo] cannot be viewed by anyone else on the Web.” Whoo-pity-do, so it’s secure and no info can be viewed by others. What’s your point with the ‘pop-up’ I.E.?
3. If you want to have multiple tabs, multiple home pages, multiple etc, WITHOUT having to updgrade/buy more of MS stuffs, you need Firefox!
4. If you are serious about search engine optimization (SEO), you need Firefox.
5. If you want customization, versatility and management, then you need Firefox: downloads Firefox’s gazillion of plugins like you do with WordPress .
6. If you want me to show you how to use Firefox in your search & optimization effort, then consider Firefox.
7. And above all, if you you do not want to get annoyed by all the websites breaking up all over places in I.E., please consider switching to Firefox! Firefox is web-surfers & webmaster friendly .

So now you ask, “Why I have such a fired passion for Firefox?” Well, if you have seen all my sites in Internet Explorer, you’ll… …

So, please get Firefox now, if you haven’t Internet ExplorerS.

I personally recommend Firefox Portable: it’s free, and if you want to make your Firefox browser to look exactly like I.E. or any way you want it, check out this page .

O.K. Best of luck to your hopefully ’seamless’ transition to Firefox. O.K. then, adieu Internet ExplorerS.

*P.S. As you can see, from now on I’ll go ALL-OUT promoting

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BUT–luckily, there’s a WordPress plugin to fix this problem. And without further ado, here it is:

Permalinks Migration Plugin for WordPress: “With this plugin, you can safely change your permalink structure without breaking the old links to your website,and even doesn’t hurt your google pagerank.”

You can find details on how to change your old permalink structure of your blog to a new one there. And, yes, the author of that plugin also recommend /%category%/postname%/ as the permalink structure for your SEO blog–just like what I had posted on WordPress SEO Tutorial: The Best SEO Permalink Structure.

Also, there is a plugin called Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin. It’s a “WordPress plugin that replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.”Yet, another one is called Angsuman’s Permanent Redirect. This plugin works “[w]hen a post or static page (in WP context) is fetched (using its permalink) for viewing the plugin checks if the post has a “redirect” custom field set. If it is set then a permanent redirect status is sent to the client/browser indicating that the post has permanently moved to the location (URL) specified in the value of “redirect”. So the viewer is automatically moved to the new location.”

*I personally recommend Permalinks Migration Plugin for WordPress if you are going to ‘permanently’ change your old permalink structure to a new one (to /%category%/postname%/ I hope .

And there you have it, the “3 WordPress Plugins to Safely Change Your Permalink Structure”
w/out losing any link love . Best of luck to your permalink transition . O.K. then adieu.

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‘Headspace2 – The Ultimate Meta-Tags Plugin!’

Why’s Headspace2 the Ultimate WordPress meta-tag plugin?

Simple, it’s because Headspace2 can do most of the functions that other WordPress plugins COMBINED!

Anyway, you can read my last post on “Top WordPress Meta-Tag Plugins List+Descriptions” for more reasons and update on the “ULTIMATE META-TAGS PLUGIN.”

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