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…

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.

SEO is about traffic and conversion!

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.

When I look for VPS hosting, WHM/CPanel is a must because I am used to it and too lazy to learn to use a new hosting control panel.

No Cheap VPS Hosting in Singapore

If you are like me, who have been looking around for cheap VPS hosting in Singapore, you will find that you have to pay S$90 (about US$60) a month for a VPS plan with WHM/CPanel.

As compared with the VPS plan based in the US, the same configuration would probably cost you less than US$30 a month.

Why Look For Cheap VPS Hosting?

But why do you want it cheap.

I wanted VPS hosting because of the root access and ability to customize my own web server applications. Also for the reliability and managed support. I ended up using Essential VPS Plan offered by ServInt after trying testing several other Web hosting services over the past 2 months.

You probably wanted VPS for reliability and stability too. And reliability and stability don’t come cheap.
Higher priced VPS plans are usually more reliable because of less over-selling and better hardware e.g. Dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, RAID-10/SATA II, Off-site Backup and so on.

However, if you are willing to use a US-based datacenter, you can still look for a bargain at WebHostingTalk’s VPS Hosting Offer Forum.

Why Not Try Data Centers at the West Coast, USA

Make sure you select to host at the data center located in the west coast or Los Angeles, USA. Servint LA is a good choice for you and your visitors. Your websites will get faster response when access from Singapore and other Asia Pacific region compared to data centers located in other part of the USA.

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.

to be continued…

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.

Site owners are concerned if their web servers are fast enough for their customers. To those who run e-commerce sites with shopping cart, how quickly a web page loads up is very important to your visitors.

So How Do You Know If Your e-Commerce Site Is Fast Enough?

You can do this simple benchmark test.

1. Clear or delete all your browser cache.
If you do not know how to clear your browser cache, view these video tutorials:

2. Load up your e-commerce website.
(Time it with a stopwatch if you have to.)

3. Load up Amazon.com.

If you feel your website loads up as fast as Amazon.com then you are ok.

You can also compare the loading time of your site vs your competitors’.

If your web server is slow to response, then you may want to see if your mail server(and anti-virus software) is taking up valuable CPU/RAM resources and consider migrating your email to Google Apps to improve the performance of your web server without upgrading any existing hardware.

We are not only talking about optimizing your website for search engine robots; we are talking about making better for real human visitors – your potential customers.

For the technically inclined, you will understand that the mail server is taking up valuable resources on the machine which you also use to serve Web pages. Such sharing of CPU resources may slow down your website performance.

Website Optimization

Dynamic website using content management systems and blogs will suffer in terms of performance, i.e. how quickly the page is displayed on your visitors’ computer.

Now let say you stop using the mail servers and dedicate all the computing power to your CMS and blogs, then their performance will definitely improve.

Likewise, if you are running a busy e-commerce website with shopping-cart then you definitely want to use all the computing power for a smooth check-out process and give the best customer’s experience.

Stop using your Web server for email hosting, instead use Google Apps for all your business email accounts.

Google Apps Email Features

The biggest advantage is the SPAM and virus filtering.

Can you imagine those emails with virus infected attachment sitting next to your gorgeous Web pages!?

Even with anti-virus software installed, the mail server which comes with your Web hosting account cannot compare to the level of security and the computing which Google can offer.

If you are interested to know more about the fantastic features which Google hosted email for business can offer, visit

http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/security/index.html

And Google gives you 100 free email accounts with 6GB of storage each.

POP3/SMTP for Outlook and Outlook Express

You can access your business email using the familiar GMail webmail interface and/or download your email messages to Outlook or Outlook Express.

Your email address will remain the same, i.e.

yourname@yourcompany.com

And not some esoteric mynamenotavailable@gmail.com

However, in order to use the free Google Apps and your own domain name, you need to edit the DNS/MX settings. For those who have an existing Web hosting, you can get your hosting provider to enter the MX records provided by Google.

Set Up A Domain Just for Google Email Account

If you have an idling domain name or thinking of registering a new one just to take advantage of the email service of Google Apps and not to host a website, then you have to make sure your domain registrar also offers DNS hosting or DNS management.

GoDaddy and many other domain registrars do not offer this option because I guess they want you to also buy hosting from them.

Try Name.com, you can use Google Apps with their domains.

Otherwise you’ll need to register for the free DNS management service at ZoneEdit.com

Set Up SPR Record for Your Google Email Addresses

Last point, you will want to set up a SPF record. At your DNS management, add the following TXT record:

“v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all”

The participants are very enthusiastic about WordPress blogging and making their blog posts visible in Google within hours.

SEO Blogging Community Forums

In order to provide a continuing learning platform for the participants, I decided to create the SEO Blogging Community Forums, a place where not only the Blogging Workshop can discuss SEO Blogging but is also open to the anyone interested to make their blogs to be visible and ranked top in Google.

Visit the forums and register now… http://myblog.sg/community/

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.