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.

If you are looking for blogging for money and make a quick buck with splogs then you’ve come to the wrong place.

Blogging For Business

This SEO Blogging Workshop will complement the SEO Web Design Course which we have been conducting since November last year. After several runs of the SEO Web Design Course, we are getting requests to help our participants, mainly business owners, to set up blog to promote their main online business sites.

The primary objective of the SEO Blogging Workshop is:

To install and set up a Wordpress blog that is SEO-friendly and to achieve top ranking in search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

We plan to conduct this half-day SEO Blogging Workshop on weekends.

The first SEO Blogging Workshop will be held on Saturday, 22 March 2008. However, this first workshop will be by invitation only.

Our public SEO Blogging Workshop series will start in April 2008.

SEO Blogging Workshop Outline:

1. The Advantages of Using Blog vs Conventional Static Site
2. Strategic Applications of Blog to Promote Your Online Business
3. Blogging Platforms and Blog Engines
4. Where to Find FREE SEO-Friendly Blog Platform
5. The Pros and Cons of Using Wordpress

Hands-on sessions:

6. Step-by-step Guide to Installing Wordpress in 5 Minutes
7. Using SEO-Friendly Wordpress Themes
8. Extending Wordpress with Wordpress Plugins
9. How to Structure a Successful Blog for Business
10. The Unbreakable Rules of SEO Copywriting for Blog

Requirements: If you know how to email and use Microsoft Word, then you are OK. Bring along your Wi-fi enabled notebook for the hands-on sessions.

The above 10 topics are what I feel most people will want to learn about blogging with Wordpress. However, I may have missed out some very important topics and not answer your most important questions on blogging for business.

Please help me.

What are Your Top 3 Questions On Blogging?

Write your questions in the Comment box below. Thank you.

How To Be Invited
You will be invited if you have attended our SEO Web Design Course or SEO Workshop. Otherwise, send us your Top 3 Questions on Blogging and we will send you an invitation for the 22 March 2008 SEO Blogging Workshop.

Digital footprints help you to create visibility for yourself or your company and drive traffic to your sites.

It is easy to create a personal digital footprint. However, there are certain “rules” that you need to be aware of when you are trying to create a digital footprint for your company.

When I create personal footprints, I drive the traffic to this blog.

Creating Digital Footprints for Your Company

As for my SEO training business, I drive traffic to Finggle.com. BTW, after about 6 months of leaving digital footprints at strategic locations, www.finggle.com is now ranked among the top 10 for SEO training and related search terms.

To understand more about Digital Footprints, you may want to read this white paper published by Harry Hallman.

Creating Digital Footprints Your Prospects Can Follow

I wished I’d read this white paper 6 months ago. I would have saved much time on trial and error!

Go read Harry’s white paper now.

It is like having a Twitter blog with totally full control, customization plus the advantage of your favorite plugins.

In fact, I have it installed on a Wordpress MU site - wassup.myblog.sg.

It has been 4 days since I started playing with microblogging. And I have hacked the Wordpress MU and tweaked the Proloque template extensively to get it work the way I want it.

The good thing is I have been making several posts a day at my new Twitter-like microblog. Because the post is generally short, just a few sentences, I tend to write about anything and everything. I think you hear about my ranting more often at my new micro-blog.

Keeping tracking of my learning experience with Wordpress MU and customizing Wordpress templates is definitely Twitter-worthy. That’s why I have made record number of posts since I started blogging 4 years ago.

If you are interested in Wordpress and microblogging, visit wassup.myblog.sg and give me some comments.

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.

People are actually searching for Mac Air Book! I tried a various combination of these search terms at Google and Yahoo, “mac air book” was one of the common suggestion.

MacBook Air is Now Available in Singapore

According to a report in today’s Digital Life, the MacBook Air has arrived in Singapore. I wish I could lay my hand on one of these super thin notebook.

And when I get one of these world’s thinnest and sexiest Mac, I will call it Mac Air Book.

In fact, there was a comment in my earlier post on Mac Air Book that it sounds “so much better”.

What do you think?

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.

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

Yes, I think the MacBook Air is magic. It has the magic to make me say “I want” when I first laid my eyes on it.

I received an email newsletter from Apple yesterday and I saw this super thin MacBook Air. I clicked at the photo and was taken to the new MacBook Air - Thinovation.

If you haven’t seen the MacBook Air ad yet, go watch it now below:

And I was wowing away… and then drool. Yeah, pretty disgusting. Well, I mean “Isn’t the MacBook Air disgustingly pretty!?”

Then I realized the whole world is talking about it.

Is it MacBook Air or Mac AirBook?

I was listening to the radio. And the DJs are talking about the world’s thinnest notebook. These DJs from the local radio station(in Singapore) were kind of confused over the name of this latest Apple’s invention - she was calling it Mac AirBook?

So I went googling for Mac AirBook. To may surprise, there are more than 250 entries on “Mac AirBook”.

Here’s a MacBook Air Guided Tour:

By the way, if you are thinking of buying the Mac Airbook in Singapore, you’ll have to pay more. The new Mac Airbook costs S$2988 (>US$2,000) in Singapore whereas price starts at US$1,799 in the US.