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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Since I am situated in Singapore accessing the internet using Singnet, Google.com.sg is my default gateway which serves results relevant to Singapore.

By clicking at “Go to Google.com”, I can force select to search at Google.com which will displayed results relevant to the USA.

Or you can go to search for results relevant Taiwan at www.google.com.tw

For the respective country codes, please visit ISO.org

To demonstrate the above observations, you can use the search term: seo at the respective google.ccTLD Web sites. I found that this blog is listed #6 in www.google.com.sg but nowhere to be found in www.google.com or any ccTLD that I am familiar with e.g. au, ca, cn, de, hk, id, in, jp, kr, my, nz, ph, ru, th, tw and vn.

Even if you insist on using Google.com as your default search engine, you can still display search results relevant to a particular country by using the variable gl and the respective country code in the search query.

For example to display UK results:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seo&gl=uk

Most people will want to be found on Google search results of their home country and at Google.com. Many people believe that it is important to be found in Google.com because that is where you can get the most traffic. However, to compete in Google.com is more difficult than other English speaking google.ccTLD.

I am happy to be found in Google.com.sg, my home country and also the country where my target visitors come from. What about you?

• Promote Your Training Business Online in 60 Minutes
• Exploit the Internet to Kick-Start Your Training Business

Basically, I have to provide enough information during the 1 hour so that all the Certified Professional Trainers course participants will have some good knowledge to start creating an online presence to describe their own expertise and the training or workshop they are offering.

I will show them how I have done it with my SEO Web Design Course and also how other reputable trainers and speakers, such as Ron Kaufman and Seth Godin use the Internet to promote their training business.

There are many free tools and resources available online for professional trainers to a promote and market their courses, workshops and seminars.

Social Media Marketing

One of the most powerful way to market online is through the social networking websites. MySpace.com and LinkedIn.com are just two of the many social networking websites that your can use. Other form of social networking includes forum, which is also a good place to get attention and potential clients for your training business.

Update December 22, 2006
In less than one week, this post is now ranked 13th for the keywords certified professional trainers and 8th for certified professional trainers course in Google. It will be nice if it can be ranked for professional trainer certification course too.