Why did Wordtracker.com, a Google PageRank PR7 website, use CSS to hide text such as: Primary navigation, Help navigation and Secondary navigation? And why Google did not penalize such untrustworthy act?

It is stated clearly in Google’s Hidden text and links – Webmaster Help Center that the use of hidden text “can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy”.

Does it mean that a PR7 site can hide text using CSS and not get penalized?

I discovered the hidden text several months ago when trying to figure out how Google generate sitelinks for some of these high PR sites.

When I searched for free keyword tool, Wordtracker was Number 1 and appeared to be “authoritative” site with a list of sitelinks.

Initially, I didn’t want to blow up the matter and waited for the PageRank update to see if Google will take action and downgrade Worktracker.com but nothing changed. Worktracker continues to be a “trusted” site.

Now that we know Google “tolerated” certain hidden text technique using CSS, you may want to try it on a MFA or throw-away site. Here’s how Wordtracker did the trick.

Hide Text with CSS Position:Absolute & Left:-999em

The hidden words to be hidden were enclosed within <em> and </em> tags.

Click Here to View Full-size Image

The <em> attribute was modified with absolute position and the words were placed way out of the viewable area.

Click Here to View Full-size Image

Warning: Use the above Hidden Text CSS technique at your own risk! You may be penalized by Google eventually.

Here’s a couple of testimonials I got from participants of my recent SEO Workshop organized by Finggle.

After conducting numerous(more than 15, I think) SEO Workshops and SEO Web Design Courses over the past 2 years, I found that foreigners were more forthcoming in giving testimonials.

Kala Nehete – www.aromahomespa.com

And the following one by a Search Marketing Analyst with Fairfax Digital, Sydney, Australia. Watch the video below and find out why he came to Singapore to attend the SEO Workshops…

Mark Vozzo – www.markvozzo.com

To view more testimonials, visit www.youtube.com/finggle

After reading Kian Ann’s amazing feat on getting into Google’s 1st Page in 17 minutes, I started a series of experiments to test if such results are reproducible. Yes. I managed to repeat the results again and again.

So far, the fastest result I obtained was 13 minutes for a 7-terms phrase. My newest test done less than an hour ago with the search terms sph search, got into the 8th position in about 19 minutes.

In fact, the web page was ranked 13th within 11 minutes. I guess it took Google algorithm another several minutes before realizing that the domain has got another page ranked at 7th and promoted the new page to the 8th position.

Here’s another screen shot of a web page which got into the Google SERPs in 13 minutes:

In another independent test, Kian Ann made a new post about SITEX 2007. I read about the post about 30 min. after the published the article. I did a search on Google for sitex 2007 and found the article was ranked No. 9. I estimated that it took about 31 minutes for this page to appear in Google’s top 10 results. Here’s the screen shot:

In conclusion, I am very confident that with a blog, one can get a web page into Google index and ranked in the top 3 pages within 30 minutes for a moderately competitive keyword. I am amazed to discover that Google is capable of delivery the latest information almost instantaneously to the marketplace.

Learn How To Get Top Google Ranking in 17 Minutes

I will be discussing this Fast Ranking Technique in the coming SEO Workshop on the 22 and 23 Nov 2007. You will learn exactly how we achieve this results during the 2-day hands-on workshop. Visit the following URL and register for your seat now!

http://www.finggle.com/seo-workshop/

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If you’ve experienced such fast indexing and ranking in Google with your web page, please leave your thought in the comment below. Thank you.

I am revamping the course content of the SEO Web Design Workshop. The original workshop was targeted at website owners, webmasters, web designers, internet entrepreneurs and people who are more into DIY websites. And I have been conducting this SEO training workshop since July 2005.

Why Corporate Training

I think it is now time to switch the focus to corporate training especially the marketing professionals. There is a need for marketing professional to use the new media to reach out to their potential customers. The traditional media may not be sufficient and as effective as the new media for the new generation of consumers who are more tech-savvy than ever.

And search marketing and search engine optimization are skills that are crucial to the success of marketing on the Internet. Search marketing has become an integral part of many Fortune 500 companies overall marketing strategies.

The new Search Engine Optimization Course for Marketing Professionals will be quite different from what I have been doing. I am still in the process of planing the course outline and course content.

For the readers of this blog, I’ll let you have peek at my unfinished work.

Search Engine Optimization Workshop

Optimizing Your Company Website for Search Engines Traffic

Search Engine Basics
- How Search Engines Work
- How Searchers Work
- Driving Search Traffic to Your Website

Designing Website for Search Engines
- Dangerous Pitfalls to Avoid At All Cost
- Making Your Website Crawlable
- SEO: White-Hat vs Black-Hat

Link Popularity
- Why is Link Popularity Important?
- How to Measure Link Popularity
- Winning the Search Ranking Race

Link Building Strategies
- Reciprocal Link and One-Way Link
-
-

Keyword Research
- Keyword Concept
- Using the The Long Tail Concept
- Step-by-step Keyword Selection

Optimizing Your Content
- Man vs Machine
-
-

Case Studies
-
-
-

Leave me a comment if you are a marketing professional and think if I’ve missed out important topics which will be essential for marketing professionals.

Search engine optimization could be easy when you follow simple steps that were already proven to work. Here, I summarize my years of experience to these 3 simple steps for beginners and aspiring SEO specialists.

Follow these 3 simple steps and very quickly you’ll be on your way to the top ranking in the search engines.

• Determine Your Keyword
• Analyse Your Competition with Google and Yahoo
• Outrank Your Competition with Better Content

1. Determine Your Keyword

Many website owners want to rank high in the search engine but don’t know what keywords to target. The keyword is related to topic of your website. For example, I have a blog to provide SEO tips. The targeted keywords would be – seo tips

Each web page should target just one set of keywords.

Here’s a couple of keyword research tools to help you find the most profitable keywords:

http://www.keywordresearchtrial.com

To learn more about keywords research, you may want to sign up for a complementary Keyword Masters Course at Nichebot.

2. Analyse Your Competition with Google and Yahoo

Find out who are your strongest competitors. The top 30 listings for your target keywords are your blueprint to succeed in this SEO race.

Study and analyze your competitors. List out their strength and weakness base on the level of on-page factors and off-page optimization.

3. Outrank Your Competition with Better Content

Build better content. Stay focus on your topic of interest. Provide depth and breadth to the topic by creating as much content as possible.

Use Google to research your topic of interest. Subscribe to Google Alert for the latest news and information on your keywords.

To research for keywords related to your topic of interest, you can use this visual search engine – www.quintura.com

For example, let’s say your main topic is online marketing. Not only, you must have in-depth articles about online marketing, you also want to write about internet marketing, contextual advertising, e-commerce, email marketing, search engine optimization, web-hosting, domain registration, seasonal online shopping cycle, online shoppers behavior, traffic analytics, split testing and etc.

Professional SEO Toolkits

To analyze and compare each and every of your competitors’ website can be a daunting task. However, it is worth the time and effort when you consider the amount of traffic you’ll be getting.

You can make use of many SEO tools to help you automate some of the processes so that you can focus on the interpretation and formulating counter strategies.

I use a combination of SEO tools to help me outrank my competitors. And there is one software that I have been using since 2004 and it had helped me to save hundreds of hours. Please go download this free SEO software now!

We brought forward the date of the next SEO Web Design Workshop to June 28 and 29 instead of the first week of July. This coming SEO Workshop will be different from the previous one.

First, it is conducted on Thursday and Friday.

The reason why we change it to weekday instead of Friday and Saturday is because we’ve got requests from some companies to make it convenient for their staff as Saturday is a off day.

Second, we extend the first day. It will be from 9am to 9pm instead of 9am to 5pm.

We provide more time for our participants to create their own search engine optimized web page in class under our guidance. Previously, our participants did the web page as homework and some participants who were not so computer savvy find it challenging to use a HTML editor to create a web page.

Thirdly, the SEO workshop will be restructured.

We have been conducting this SEO Web Design Workshop for nearly 2 years now. Many people in Singapore is now aware of SEO and understand the need for SEO. We want to take SEO training to a higher level by offering an advanced course on search engine optimization and search marketing. We will call it – The Advance SEO Course.

The existing SEO Web Design Workshop will be renamed as The Basic SEO Course or The SEO Foundation Course.

The reason we go back to the basics is to make search engine optimization(SEO) really simple.

SEO is not as complicated as most people think it to be. Anybody and everybody can have success with search engine marketing.

• Have you really sit and think why you want to SEO?
• Is it because of the number 1 ranking?
• Or, you want more customers so that you make more money?

Getting search engine visibility is just one of the means to getting more sales. So even if you do not SEO, you can still make money. This is the reason why many Internet marketers tell you not worry about SEO and just get a huge database of email addresses. Since you do not need to SEO, you do not need to learn HTML.

I tend to agree with getting more customers than being rank number 1.

Honestly, it is meaningless to rank number 1 if no one comes to your web page and make a purchase or provide you with their contact information.

I am not saying that you should not be number 1 in the search engine results page(SERP) for your targeted keyword. The objective is not about getting number 1 but getting customers.

SEO is to use the search engines to get the visitors (traffic)
who will make a purchase or do the most wanted response.

You see, until now, I have not made any mention of search engine spiders. Because, SEO is not just about spiders — as far as possible, I don’t want to confuse you with technical terms.

All you need to know and do is when you build an informative web page, it will be visible in the SERP and when people search for terms related to the information, a link to your page will be presented them and they will click it to come visit your page.

However, there is a small problem for all new web pages. Your web page is like a new island in a vast ocean. No one knows about this tiny island. The search engines do not know about its existence. No one will come to your new island. You will need to announce this piece of news to the whole world and get transportation link from the nearest civilization.

Getting Links from other Websites – Backlinks/Inbound Links

You have to get an established web page to link to your new web page. By established, I mean the web page is already recognized by major search engines.

Basically, it is like getting your friend to introduce her friend(the search engine), to you(your web page).

Once the search engines know about your existence, it will evaluate the content of your web page. Much like how you will size up a person when you first met him.

Search engines are programed to understand text but not picture. That’s the reason why you have to write and not just draw. The more you write the better the search engines can know about what you web page is all about.

Site Crawlabilty

Beside getting links from other web pages, you may also link to other pages with useful imformation that share similar theme.

The next very important thing that you need to do is to link up all the web pages from your home page.

Alternative, if you have a larger site with more than 40 pages, you can plan your internal linking structure in a hierarchical manner. For example, the homepage links to 5 category main pages and in turn one category main page links to each item page.

By linking all your web pages systematically, the search engines will be able to visit each one of them, collect information and evaluate every page on your website. Then all your web pages will be visible in the search engine results page.

That just about sum up my view on the very basics of search engine optimization.

Finally, I got the SEO Web Design Course press release approved by PRLeap.com. I submitted it last Friday for release on 12 Feb 2007, that was yesterday.

However, it was not approved by the editor because the format was not right.

Here’s the suggestion for me to fix the problem:

Your submission is not approved because it does not follow standard press release format.

Suggestion: Rewrite your submission using the inverted pyramid format. Make sure to put the most newsworthy information at the top, and then the remaining information follows in order of importance, with the least important at the bottom.

A press release should have a headline, summary, lead paragraph, body and about section. A press release should read like a news story. A good release will sound as if it’s been lifted from the front page of a newspaper. News stories are written in third person.

The only time your press release should contain pronouns such as I, we, us, or, you, your, etc. is when you are quoting someone. Opinions should only be expressed inside quotation marks.

I rewrote the headline and the summary. Kiat Wee helped me to rewrite the body according to the inverted pyramid format. Go read the press release now:

MyWebCulture Announces SEO Web Design Course in Singapore
The SEO Web Design course reveals strategies for designing
search engine friendly websites and teaches website owners
proven SEO techniques that will enhance search engine...

You see, the headline and the sumary sound quite formal and matter of fact. However, I feel that the body of the press release is not exactly “inverted pyramid”. It would be pretty boring to make it that way.

What is important is the lead paragraph. It has to be the most important paragraph – to summarize what the press release is all about. In this case, what the SEO Web Design training is all about and what so special, I mean newsworthy, is this piece of information.

Also the headline has to be like news headline, no pitching and no sensationalizing. It has to sound really formal. And I don’t like such writing. I can’t write in that way!

PRLeap.com Press Release Stats

I like the statistic provided by PRLeap.com. It shows how many times the press release was viewed and also when the search engine robots have visited.

Google News

The press release was “immediately” picked up by Google News.

I was having trouble with canonical URLs issue with this blog. When you entered http://shihengcheong.com/blog it would be redirected to

http://www.shihengcheong.com.com/blog/

You see, I’ve been used mod_rewrite to redirect all URL with www- prefix to the non-www URL i.e.

http://shihengcheong.com/

The mod-rewrite in the .htaccess at the root directory works fine.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^shihengcheong.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://shihengcheong.com/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

Last month, I installed WordPress to the folder, /blog/, and I got stuck with the canonical URLs problem.

Here’s the problem. I guess people do not type the trailing slash when they enter the URL.

This is probably what most people will type:

shihengcheong.com/blog

So, for the past month, you’ve probably noticed that the displayed URL at your browser address bar was

http://www.shihengcheong.com/blog/

and not the shorter version without the www.

I was not very happy with this www URL. I want the search engine robots to index my page as http://shihengcheong.com/blog/ and hide away all other variations of URLs that will display the identical page.

I am no mod_rewrite and .htaccess expert. In fact, I simply copy what’s working and modify it according. The intricacies of mod_rewrite and web server programming is not my cup of tea.

Modifications to WordPress URL Rewrite .htaccess

Finally, I stumbled upon a snippet of sample .htaccess codes for some WordPress plugins yesterday. And I got an idea to solve my canonical URLs problem. Here’s how I resolved the trailing slash problem.

I added the following codes to the .htaccess created by WordPress:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^shihengcheong.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://shihengcheong.com/blog/$1 [L,R=301]
</IfModule>

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>>
# END WordPress

If you are new to canonical URLs problem , you may want to read Matt Cutts SEO Advice on URL Canonicalization. And yes, Google might have fixed the problem but there are many more search engines out there which are not as smart.

I believe many people will love to see their blogs or blog posts being ranked top in the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Live(MSN) Search.

And I thought I would prepare a 90-minute seminar to introduce working executives to SEO and Blogging with a catchy title…

Getting Top Search Ranking for Your Blog
Let Your Customers Find & Tell You What They Think About Your Service and Product

However, I know that there are already many articles written on the topic of Search Engine Optimization for Blog and Top Search Engine Ranking for Blog.

1. How to Optimize Your Blog for Search Engines
2. 25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines
3. How to Optimize Your Blog
4. 7 Ways to Optimize Your Blog
5. How To: Optimize Your Web Site
6. How to Optimize your Blog’s Search Engine Ranking
7. WordPress and SEO

There are of course more than 7 articles available on the Internet, but these are the better ones that I’ve found. And I will learn from these great Blog SEO Specialists to hammer out my very own 90-minute seminar on How To Get Top Search Ranking For Your Blog.

[UPDATE Jan 31, 2007] I just discovered that there is a 1-day workshop on Blog Marketing. So I may as well not re-invent the wheel and direct working executives interested in corporate blogging to go check out:

• http://www.PracticalBlogMarketing.com