It is a fact that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is losing the browser market share. According to the latest Top Browser Share Trend by NetMarketShare.com, IE market share dropped from 60.65% in March 2010 to 56% in Jan 2011 and Firefox dropped from 25.52% to 22.75% in the same period. IE and Firefox losses was Chrome and Safari gains!

My Own Website says Firefox is Number 1

However, according to Google Analytics data of a 1-month old travel guide website, the market share for all the four browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safar and Chrome was between 20.91% to 30.49%. From above table, you can that more people are using Firefox than IE which attracted only 24.56%, far lesser than the 56% reported by NetMarketShare.

I was surprised to see the result of the browser market share on the new website. And the result has proven that cross-browser compatibility should a requirement for every website development and is more important than 1 year ago.

More People are Using Firefox, Chrome and Safari

Because this is a brand new website, the main traffic source was from Facebook. Also, most of the visitors are from Singapore, Southeast Asia and India.

Now, does it mean more people are using Firefox, Chrome and Safari to log on to Facebook?

And people who started to use Facebook in the past 12 months prefered to use non-IE browsers because they are more IT-savvy?

Have you made your web design compatible to all the top four web browsers listed in the table above?

Last week, I spoke with a Web designer from an established Web design and development firm in Singapore to find out why many of these companies have not adopted SEO as part of their offering to their clients.

The Web designer questioned the need for SEO when their clients could pay for sponsored links to get visitors to their sites.

I want to know what other people thinks, so I posted this question to my Linkedin community:

Why bother to SEO when you can pay for sponsored links?

And here’s some of the replies I received.

Jolly Tan:

I am just wondering if this web designer is trying to make fast bucks out of his clients, and not helping them get into top search engine ranking organically.

Business Owners need to beware! I think the better advice is…. business owners need to be educated to understand of how they can strategically plan their web sites to be SEO-friendly, and find their websites ranked favorably amongst their competitors.

Paying for sponsored links is one way to get traffic and new leads (which can be expensive and a waste), but business owners need to know that they also can get free leads from organic search results.

This way, they maximise marketing effort by using both sponsored links and the organic search results through SEO.

CK Lee:

If a service provider cannot provide “value added” service to his/her clients, the day will come when his/her clients leave for someone who can take care of their interest better.

Many service providers here are pretty short-sighted, they just do what they are told. As the saying goes, it is much easier to keep a client than to find a new one. So do all things to make your clients happy and they will stay with you for years and feed your pockets.

As a service provider, he/she has to look at the project from the client’s view point. To the clients, getting a website up is not only to feel good and for branding purposes, but the ultimate objective is to get sale and, traffic is one of the way to improve sale.

And get one’s website listed in the top positions in SERP is one of the more effective way to get traffic, so, SEO is the must learned skill for all Web designer if they want to stay in this line for good and for long.

Mark Vozzo:

I feel that this mindset will have to change and that these types of Web designers are a dying breed. Clients are becoming smarter and more aware of the importance of ranking well for natural search terms.

If the client’s objective is to get more traffic from Search Engines, then SEO is vital, SEM is a bonus add-on. There are numerous eye tracking studies (see Enquiro Research www.enquiroresearch.com) that prove that more eyeballs and more clicks occur in the Natural Search Results area of Google/Yahoo/MSN Live etc. In some studies I’ve read, sponsored link traffic only attracts 1 or 2 out of every 10 clicks.

From my own experience running very large PPC campaigns for Australian media news web sites e.g. www.smh.com.au and www.brisbanetimes.com.au, we get far more traffic from natural search (~30%) than paid search (~1-2%).

Henry Huang:

It will be ideal if SEO is core competence of web designers. However, in the real market, not many are aware what SEO is about. Could you sum it up in layman term? According to my web designer, Google states clearly that they do not simply go for keywords, so anyone who promises you of keyword optimizing for website design is actually a bluff. Do you agree?

We know Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing(YSN) and Microsoft adCenter can be very effective in driving targeted traffic to your Web site and help you make money. So why do you want to pay thousands of dollars to hire an SEO consultant to optimize your site?

Post your comments below.

Earlier today, I met with a graphic designer from Fly Design. We had a brief discussion on search engine ranking.

She wants to learn more about search engine optimization and hopefully get her company site ranked in Google and Yahoo for graphic design related search terms.

So, I visited her Web site and very quickly discovered what was preventing it from being found in the search engine result listing.

Search Engine Spider Traps

The homepage, www.flydesign.com.sg, is a pure SWF Flash – there is no textual content. Basically, no “food” for the spiders.

There is no hyperlink (anchor text link) to the inner pages of the site – a classic example of a perfect spider trap.

To make things worse, even if the spiders did find the inner pages, it would be useless. The pages, again like the homepage, has no textual content except for the footer .

How to Rectify the Problem

Don’t use images in place of text. Textual content is “spider food”, so use text.

Ideally, I will recommend at least 150 words in each page. Make sure you use your targeted keywords a couple times in the content.

Use CSS to Achieve Aesthetic Appeal

To create the visual effect, use CSS – here’s a showcase of what CSS can do, visit css Zen Garden.

Don’t know what is CSS or cascading style sheet? Go do a search at Google.

There are heaps of CSS tutorials online, or get yourself a couple of Web design books focusing the use of CSS.

I had just made a short video on the use of IMG ALT tag at my other SEO blog and was pondering what to write at this blog. Then I saw an earlier post on how an unethical Web designer in Singapore hijacked his client’s Web page. So I did a quick search on Google for the unethical web designers in singapore and guess what I found…

thepinnacles.com is Number 1 for the keyword phrase “unethical web designers in singapore“. However, the page ranked was an alternative landing page and looked like this.

Sometime You Don’t Want To Be Ranked Number 1

You must be wondering why Google indexed and ranked a broken Web page, thepinnacles.com/alternative.htm

I checked the HTML source of the page and could not find the word “unethical” anywhere on the page including meta tags and comments. So it is not just on-page optimization that got this page to #1. I guess it was the backlink that did the trick – people link to the Web site with the word “unethical” in the anchor text!

Unlike the other Web page listed in the search result which actually talk about unethical web designers.

So, Google is Right

So there may be some truth in Google #1 ranking for the unethical Web designer in Singapore. It shows that Google put more emphasis on what other people said about your Web site than what you said.

There is another interesting finding on that search result listing – the Sponsored Links.

Why would so many people want to display their ads when people search for “unethical Web designers in Singapore”?

Meanwhile, I really need to go and will let you figure it out.

I have just uploaded a video testimonial on SEO Web Design Course recorded 2 days ago. This video featured Terence Yap of BPI Technology (S) Pte Ltd who attended the SEO Web Design Course on 6 Oct 2007.

Terence registered a new domain and created a new site,
www.MoldReleaseNanoTechnology.com to test out what he learned at the course. To cut the story short, his new site was ranked in the first page of Google for his targeted keywords within 2 weeks. He was very surprised but overjoyed with the results.

Watch the following video and hear what he has to say…

Or click SEO Web Design Course video testimonial to watch the above testimonial at YourTube.

You can find more testimonials on SEO Web Design Course and SEO Workshop at the new YouTube Channel:

http://www.youtube.com/finggle

Are you looking for SEO specialists or SEO consultants to help optimize your website for search engine?

The first thing you will probably do is to google for these search terms:SEO services or SEO company, maybe you’re also use SEO specialists and SEO consultants. In fact it is more likely that you use the first 2 search terms.

How do I know?

Because, Google Suggest suggested these search terms when you type in “seo”.

First, you have to make sure whether you are looking for a SEO specialist or a SEO Consultant. So what’s the difference?

SEO Consultants

You look for SEO consultant if you or your company has an existing web design team – in-house or outsourced, it doesn’t really matter. The SEO consultant will some along, study and analyze your website and competitors’ websites, and develop a strategy for your to improve your search engine visibility and search ranking. Usually, she does not do the actual optimization of your website codes and build links for you. Your existing web development team will have to do the actually work.

SEO Specialists

As for a SEO specialist, she will more likely to do most of the tweaking of the codes, internal linking and link building campaign.

When you hire a SEO consultant to improve your website, she may in get her SEO specialists to do the grunt work such as tweak the HTML of your website, re-linking or re-structure the internal linking, and build links for you.

So you will have to make sure what you are paying for: the advice only or the advice plus the grunt work.

Here’s an article to help you Choose A SEO Company to do the search engine optimization for your website.

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.

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.