The IT Show 2010 is the first of the 4 big annual consumer electronics shows: in March, IT Show; in June, PC Show; in August, COMEX and in November, SITEX.

This year IT Show starts on Thursday, 11 March and last day on Sunday, 14 March at the Suntec Singapore. The opening hours of the IT Show 2010 is from 12 noon to 9pm daily.

Because I wrote about these computers, digital cameras and electronics events in a couple of my blogs over the past years, I have collected some very hot keywords. And traffic for IT Show related search is already going up. Visitors to my blog post on IT Show has nearly doubled.

What Keywords to Use for IT Show 2001

Well, the obvious one is “it show”. However, people who knows about the IT Show and intend to visit the show are more likely to use “it show 2010″.

But “it show” is such a generic terms and search engines will tend to show you search results for international websites instead of those talking about the IT Show 2010 in Singapore at Suntec City. So people are adding Singapore to the search terms and using “it show 2010 singapore” instead.

Here’s a list of top search phrases which brought traffic to my blog over the past 2 days.

• it show 2010
• it show 2010 singapore
• singapore it show
• singapore it show 2010
• pc fair singapore 2010
• singapore pc show 2010
• singapore pc fair 2010
• comex singapore 2010
• pc fair 2010
• pc show 2010 singapore
• it fair 2010 singapore
• computer fair 2010
• it show singapore 2010
• pc fair singapore
• computer fair 2010 singapore
• it fair singapore 2010
• it fair 2010
• singapore it fair 2010
• pc fair 2010 singapore
• singapore computer fair 2010
• pc fair

Still Not Too Late to SEO for IT Show 2010

It is not too late to write a good blog post on IT Show and get it ranked in Google and Yahoo. Avoid very hot keywords such as “it show“. Choose a longer search phrase to target. Alternatively, add brand names such as VAIO and Acer if you intend to write about laptops or Canon Powershot and Nikon Coolpix if you write about digital cameras.

If you are using AdWords to advertise on Google search or content pages, you may want to use the exact match for the above keywords. You may end up paying less and get better result in terms of converting visitors into customers.

SEO as most people know of, i.e. Dumb SEO which gets your web page into top ranking Google search engine results page, is DEAD. And many SEO specialists who know nothing more than ranking will go out of business.

Here’s why:

• Google implemented Personalized Search for everyone.
• Facebook directs more online users than Google as reported in San Francisco Chronicle on Feb 15, 2010.

And if you have been following this blog, you would have read about my post on Smart SEO is Not just about #1 Ranking on 29 November 2008. Ultimately, you are optimizing the conversion of your web pages.

Time to see beyond SEO for Google

Even when Facebook was in its infancy back in 2007, I urged businesses to make themselves visible on social networks in the article “Time to see beyond SEO for Google” published on ZDNet Asia.

Conversion Rules

A website’s KPI should not be measured by the number of visitors alone. More traffic doesn’t always means more money, otherwise Facebook should be making more money than Google by now.

There is a great dollar difference between general traffic and targeted traffic.

Marketers must know how to define the most wanted response on each web page and measure that number. Use Smart SEO to help you to get your most wanted response and improve your bottom line.

I have been writing blog posts on Singapore’s Natas Fair since 2008 and in the process collected thousand of keywords related to this annual travel events. In fact, more than 4,725 keywords related to Natas Fair drove visitors to my blog posts via the search engines over the past 2 years. Out of all these keywords, I would say “natas fair” follows by the year for e.g. natas fair 2010 is always the hottest keyword.

Keywords Used to Search for Natas Fair

Beside the hot keywords, you may also want to look at the Longtail keywords. As expected, internet users in Singapore are getting move savvy and we see that local search is getting more granular. Here’s a sample of the Natas related search terms:

• natas offers
• natas package
• natas fair offers
• natas travel deals
• natas travel package
• natas fair best deal
• best deals at natas
• pre natas promotion
• natas fair opening hours
• cheap holiday package travel natas

It doesn’t take a genius marketer to see that these are words used by people who are ready to buy a travel package, book hotel accommodation, purchase travel insurance and spend lots of money at a click…

Travel Agents Did Not Advertise on Google for Natas Fair

If you were AdSense publisher, you would be quite disappointed by the dearth of Google advertisers in Singapore for such an important travel event. You probably wonder why travel agents were not advertising on Google for Natas but spent hundred of thousands of dollars on trade fairs, print advertising and TV ads.

Natas Fair 2012

I had the feeling that Google resellers in Singapore were not working hard enough to look for travel agents to advertise on the search engine. Or they didn’t have the experience to promote for a one-time event that lasted for only 3 days. Hopefully, with better tools provided by Google e.g. Google Insights, they will do a better job and we will get more Natas Fair 2012 related ads in Google soon.

Matt Cutts announced on 10 November 2009 that full Caffeine update will roll out after the holidays. If you read between the lines in his blog post, you would suspect that Caffeine has already been rolled out in stages!

Does that means we will get drastically Google search results soon?

I guess so. In fact, Google introduced Personalized Search for Everyone since 2 days ago. So you should be seeing quite different results from your customers and competitors!

What is Google Caffeine?

Google Caffeine is a new algorithm to index and rank a web page. So it will affect your page ranking on Google result.

Here’s what Google trying to achieve with Caffeine Update… “a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Google Caffeine + Personalized Search = Bad News

Together with the Personalized Search for Everyone, your web page will be ranked very differently on your customer’s computer. And if you have been doing things which Google doesn’t like then expect your web page to disappear from Google results.

If your earning depends on Google Search then bad news…

Still not convinced that ranking is not everything? At PubCon 2008, Bruce Clay made a claim that “ranking is dead.” And Matt Cutts said ranking is not as important as it used to be.

Cutts said, “I’m not sure I would say ranking is dead but it’s not as important as it used to be. The fact is the smart SEOs are not just necessarily looking at the rankings. They are looking at conversion, they are looking at their server log. It’s great if you’re ranking for a phrase but unless that leads to sales that doesn’t help you very much.”

“The challenge is not to pay so much attention to ranking, pay attention to traffic, pay attention to conversions and keep building good content and don’t worry about ‘can I show people that I rank number one for my trophy phrase.’”

Ranking is Dead

Ranking is dead… because of personalization and intent-based search. Spiders are getting smarter. Now, you may want to have video and Flash on your web page.

Smart SEO is more just traffic; it’s about your customers and conversion!

The title of the article should be “Keyword Case Study: Online Flower Delivery in Singapore” but I think that would be too long for a blog post title. This article is about keyword selection and fast ranking for longer keyphrase. Yes, I got a 2nd page, #17 listing for online flower delivery in singapore in about 3 hours!

Flowers and florists are very competitive terms for both organic and paid listing. So I want to use a longer keyphrase that is related to both flower and florist.

Why not Flower, Flower Shop, Florist or Online Florist?

Longer keyphrases are easier to SEO and rank in the first 2 pages of the search engine result listing. Main reason being there are lesser competitions. Most site owners will target the very competitive one-word terms and two-word phrases such as flowers, florist, flower shop, online florist and so on.

Also people who entered longer keyphrases tend to be in the advanced stage of the buying cycle so the chance of her/him making a purchase is higher.

In the case study: Online Flower Delivery in Singapore, I wrote that according to OneUpWeb.com keyword study in 2005, 3-word and 4-word terms were more profitable. Owners of new site will have faster result when targeting such longer keyphrases.

Update [16 Nov 2008]: The blog post title “Online Flower Delivery in Singapore” is now ranked #6 in the 1st page of Google search result for the search terms online flower delivery in singapore and #9 for online flower delivery singapore.

I was invited to speak at the inaugural SMX Singapore on 13 & 14 October 2008 at Suntec City. Frankly, I didn’t know what to expect. I was told majority of the audience were SEM 101 and my presentation was to talk about the fundamentals of Copywriting for Search Engines.

My presentation went well. There was no question asked about SEO Copywriting – either I am so good that the audience understood everything or they were too confused to ask!

I knew it was OK because several people told me that the presentation was lively and entertaining!

I was pleasantly surprised when David Temple, Regional Head of Search with Ogilvy, came up to me, exchanged namecard and asked if I would do in-house SEO training. David was a visiting professor/lecturer in Beijing and Gurangzhou.

You can find out more about David at his blog – SEO SEM Training & Certification.

Keynote Speeches

Day 1

The first day keynote was presented by Gillian Muessig, President of SEOmoz.org, spoke about The “Business” of Search and how SEO agencies can flourish despite the difficult economic condition. Her presentation was candid and filled with real-life examples.

What others thought of Gillian Muessig’s Keynote:

• SMX Singapore Keynote – Gillian Muessig

Day 2

Harrison Gevirtz of Gevirtz Media presented the second day keynote speech on Monetising Social Media. Harrison is just 16 year old and currently studying at Santa Barbara High. Do not be fooled by his young age! His keynote was truly “mind-opening”. I now can understand better the how, what, where, when, why young people use Facebook and MySpace.

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.

How about 50,000 pages in less than 4 weeks! Yes, Google indexing is blazingly fast. It indexed more than 50,000 page of it’s competitor – the new Singapore local search engine Rednano.sg – in less than 4 weeks!

On 19 March 2008, I reported at Wassup Blog, one day after Rednano.sg was first launched that it had 1 page indexed and I captured the screenshot just 25 minutes after Google crawled the Rednano homepage.

Google Indexing is Fast

Today, 15 April 2008, less than 4 weeks after Google first indexed Rednano.sg, it has indexed more than 50,000 pages of Rednano.sg.

I have this feeling that Google engineers know more about Rednano.sg than the people at SPH Search.

Now, that we know Google can index a large Web site with ten of thousand of pages very quickly, you must be wondering…

So what did Rednano.sg do to enable fast Google Indexing?

For Google to index the page, it will to know the URL to crawl the page. For a search engine like Rednano.sg, the results will only be displayed when a user enter a query. However, Googlebot does not interact with the query box to get the result pages like a human visitor.

So Rednano.sg has to provide Googlebot the URL (permalink in blog lingo) to its result pages, URLs such as this:

http://www.rednano.sg/sfe/dir.action?querystring=YA+KUN+KAYA+TOAST

I reckon SPH Search will be happy to have Google indexed all of its directory listing and help to drive traffic to the new directory.

In order to do that, Rednano.sg has this page called Site Feature which provides the URLs to it’s inner pages:

http://www.rednano.sg/footer/sitemap.html

which has a link to

http://www.rednano.sg/sfe/dirhome.action

Search Engine Friendly Site Structure

In this way, Googlebot will crawl the following path:

-> www.rednano.sg

-> www.rednano.sg/footer/overview.html

-> www.rednano.sg/sfe/dirhome.action

-> the rest of the directory pages

As you can see, this is a site structure that works pretty well despite the fact that the rest of the pages are more than 2 levels below the homepage. If you want to build a Web site with thousand of pages listed in Google search results, make sure you design the site structure and make it “crawlable” and search engine friendly.

I was approached by Daryl Tay of Unique-Frequency to contribute SEO related articles to his blog. I, being a lazy person person, am not very sure if I can sustain the effort to write regularly for his blog.

So I came up with an idea…

“Why not ask me some questions on SEO and I will try to answer them.”

I think that will be more interesting.

And here’s the 10 SEO Questions Asked by Daryl Tan:

1. What is SEO and why does it matter?
2. What do you do in your SEO-related field of work?
3. How much should the average blogger know about SEO?
4. How does SEO apply to businesses?
5. How does Singapore measure in terms of SEO familiarity and utilisation, as compared with the rest of the world?
6. For most bloggers who may not appear in the first page of a Google search’s results, what basic steps can we take to improve that ranking?
7. What other factors affect search rankings besides SEO?
8. What are the ways people abuse SEO, and how do we look out for them?
9. Google changes it’s search algorithms from time to time, does that mean my previous SEO efforts have gone to waste?
10. What is the biggest, most common misunderstanding of SEO?

About Daryl Tay

Daryl Tay is currently pursuing his study at the Singapore Management University(SMU) majoring in Marketing and Corporate Communication.

You will get the answers to the above questions very soon, in 2 weeks’ time, at his blog http://uniquefrequency.wordpress.com

Do bookmark his blog now or subscribe to his blog feed.

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These are excellent questions targeting at Singapore’s businesses. I am very excited about answering all these 10 SEO questions and see them get published at other people’s blogs.

Do you also have some questions which you always wanted to ask?

Put them in the comment box below and I will look at them.