Internet Marketing SEO: SEO Techniques With My Personal Experience

What is working for SEO now

2009-05-12T08:41:00.003-07:00

So how is everyone doing recently? Have you ever felt SEO is getting harder and harder. What used to work well for SEO nowadays is falling out of the picture. Here is a list of techniques that used to work well:

-excessive keywords repetition in webpage

-social bookmarking site like digg.com

-buying links from other websites

-commenting on blogs

Although some of the techniques listed above are still worth trying, how effective it would be is unknown. Personally, i have been searching for new ideas and techniques that adapted well to Google's change. One thing that i have recently started to adopt is the creation of sub-domains. First of all, these squidoo like sites usually have a very high homepage PR and therefore that PR can get transferred over to the sub-domain over time if you can keep the page fresh and unique. Secondly, a lot of sites usually have "do-follow" link, which is much more valuable than "no-follow" links. There are so many websites that let user generate their own contents and their sub-domains, one of the sites I would recommend is weebly.com. So take the action and get your keywords picked before it is too late.

External Factors for Search Ranking Position

2007-08-29T22:14:00.000-07:00

Reciprocal Links
A long time ago, webmasters used to trade links strategically to achieve radical improvements in rankings. This created an artificial number of self-serving votes. Over time, search engines became wiser and they devalued such reciprocal links. In response, search engine marketers created link-exchanging schemes with multiple parties to avoid detection. Modern search engines can detect such simple subterfuge as well. That is not to say that reciprocal linking is bad, but it should be balanced by several one-way links as well. The combination of the two models something more natural-looking and will result in higher ranking.

Number of Links on a Page
A link on a page with few outbound links is generally worth more than a link on a page with many outbound links. This concept is also implied by the formula for Google’s PageRank.

Semantic Relationship among Links on a Page
A search engine may assume that a page with many links to pages that are not semantically related is a links page, or some sort of page designed to manipulate rankings or trade links. It is also believed that even naming a page with the word “links” in it, such as links.php, may actually devalue links contained within that particular page. So do name your URL wisely such as resources.

IP Addresses of Cross-Linked Sites
It is sometimes useful to think of an IP address as you do a phone number. For this example’s sake, format a hypothetical phone number, (123) 555-1212, differently—as if it were an IP:
IP addresses located in the same C class — that is, addresses that match for the first three
octets (xxx.xxx.xxx.*) — are very likely to be nearby, perhaps even on the same server.
When sites are interlinked with many links that come from such similar IP addresses, they will be regarded suspiciously, and those links may be devalued. For example, a link from domainA on 100.100.1.1 to domainB on 100.100.1.2 is a link between two such sites. Done excessively, this can be an indicator for artificial link schemes meant to manipulate the rankings of those web sites.

TLD of Domain Name for a Link
It is widely believed that .edu and .gov domain names are less susceptible to manipulation and therefore weighed more heavily. This is disputed by some search engine marketers as the actual factor, and they assert that the same effect may be as a result of the age (most schools and governmental agencies have had sites for a while), and amount of links that they’ve acquired over time. It is mostly irrelevant, however, what the underlying reason is. Getting a link from a site that fits this sort of profile is very desirable — and most .edu and .gov domains do.

Link Location
Links prominently presented in content near the center of the page may be regarded by the search engines as more important. Links embedded in content presented near the bottom of a page are usually less important; and external links at the bottom of a page to semantically unrelated sites may, at worst, be a criterion for spam-detection. Presentation location is different than physical location. The physical location within the document was historically important, but is less of a factor more recently. Ideally, the primary content of a page should be early in the HTML source of a web page, as well as prominently displayed in the center region of a web page. More on this topic is discussed in Chapter 6, "SE-Friendly HTML and JavaScript."

External Links influcing the search engine ranking

2007-08-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

Seeing so many subscribers still interested blog, i have decided to keep posting here. So welcome come back and let us learn more together. I am going to talk about the external factors can influence the search engine rankings of a web site today:
-Quantity, quality, and relevance of inbound links
- Link churn
- Link acquisition rate
- Link anchor text and surrounding copy
- Reciprocal links
- Number of links on a page
- Semantic relationships among links on a page
- IP addresses of cross-linked sites
-TLD of domain name for a link
- Link location
- Web standards compliance
- Detrimental “red-flag” factors

Quantity of Inbound Links
A site with many inbound links is likely to be relevant because many people voted for it by placing the link on their sites. There are some caveats here with regard to whether the links are detected to be part of an artificial link scheme, and quality is also a concern as explained in the next section. However, more is generally better.

Quality of Inbound Links
A popular web site that links to you prominently that itself has many inbound links and a good reputation is likely to mean more than a link from a random page from an unimportant web site with few links. There is no absolute definition that describes "quality." Search engines themselves struggle with this definition and use very complicated algorithms that implement an approximation of the human definition. Use your judgment and intuition.

Relevance of Inbound Links
A search engine is likely to view a link from a semantically related web page or site as more valuable than a link from a random unrelated one. Usually, a series of links with very similar anchor text from unrelated sources is an indicator of an artificial link scheme, and they may be devalued. Too many links from irrelevant sources may result in a penalty. This has led to speculation that competitors can hurt your web site by pointing many such links to your web site.

Link Churn
Links that appear and disappear on pages are likely to be part of a linking scheme. The rate at which these links appear and disappear is termed “link churn.” If this happens frequently, it may be regarded as spam. Those links will either be devalued, or at worst your web site will be regarded as spam and penalized. Unless you are participating in such a scheme, this should probably not be a concern.

Link Acquisition Rate
An algorithm may view the acquisition of many thousands of links by a new site as suspicious, if not also accompanied by relevant highly ranked authority sites. Usually this is an indicator of a linking scheme. This consideration was affirmed by Google engineer Matt Cutts in one of his videos at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-seo-answers-on-video/.

Link Anchor Text and Surrounding Copy
Inbound links that contain semantically related anchor text to the content they point to have a positive effect on rankings. The copy surrounding the link, if present, may also do the same. Some even posit that this copy is as important as the link anchor text itself. Links with such surrounding copy are widely believed to be valued more by search engines, because links without copy surrounding it are frequently purchased and/or less indicative of a vote.

I will discuss more tomorrow, so keep an eye on it.

It is time to move this blog

2007-08-16T22:59:00.000-07:00

Well, I've had this blog for over a year I have decided that it is time to move this blog. For those of you who'd be still interested in the news of bestplatformbeds.com. you can check platform bed blog here. For those of you who would like to keep updated on SEO news and techniques. You are welcome to look at my new SEO blog here. I will keep it updated regularly and all suggestions are welcome.

Bedding Industry: One in Three of the Households Don't Buy

2007-03-30T10:53:00.000-07:00

The article "buying gap data reveal big bedding opportunity" reported by FurnitureToday shows that the bedding has the third highest buy-shop ratio of 71%.

What does that mean? 71% of people who shop for bedding actually bought the item. This does look like a good number to most of the marketers. However, if we look at the other side of the story, there are 29% of people who just walked away. An estimated of 4.8 billion was lost last year in the bedding category.

That does represent an opportunity to the bedding industry. Before we start thinking about how the marketers can further bump the ratio up a bit, let us take a look at the main reasons that caused the "walk away without action taken":

Many consumers are confused by the shopping experience. They see beds have very similar components but offer only slight differences
They see beds that are almost the same with a large price gap
They walk away for more choices, but at the end, they decide to delay the purchase

We should wait to see how the industry would handle this situation and whether they can make an improvement on the buy-shop ratio.

How important is a good night's sleep to people?

2007-03-23T12:46:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, I read an article on cnn.com - "Is a good night's sleep worth $50,000?" that I think I should share with all my audiences here. First of all, I was really stunned by the fact that mattress is actually costing more than cars and college tuitions. Vividus bed, which was produced by the Swedish manufacturer Hastens, cost approximately $50,000. Can you imagine that? I am wondering what is the mark-up on this incredibly priced mattress? Is it 100%, 200% or even more than that....?

Not surprisingly, since people are valuing more towards a good night's sleep, the market value of the wholesale mattress industry has increased nearly 40 percent, climbing to $6.4 billion in 2005, according to the trade group International Sleep Products Association. The luxury market makes up much of the trend here. Premium-priced mattresses, which costs more than $1,000 -- represents 21 percent of sales in 2005.

The driving force of the supply has always been the demand. The higher demand to the luxury mattresses drives more and more manufacturers to focus on the luxury market. What's behind these high demands? It is not hard to notice that the high demand towards the luxury mattress signals that people are valuing a peaceful night's sleep over their hard-earned dollar.

Platform Bed Shopping Guide is Out of Sandbox

2006-12-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

Well, all the hard work starts to pay off. I have found that the traffic to my site Platform Bed Shopping Guide got tripped during the last few weeks. What's all about that?

By using Google Analytics, I found 80% of the traffic is from Google search! Isn't that amazing? Specifically, I found that the key word "platform bed" and "platform beds" ranked #13 and #15 respectively. I used to have these key words ranked well on MSN and Yahoo, but I value the ranking much more when it is on Google simply it is so much harder to get ranked well on Google than on Yahoo and MSN.

So here I would like to take this chance to tell all the web masters that, keep working on your on-page and off-page optimization and do not give up simply because you did not see a boost of the ranking. If you keep adding fresh and quality content and building quality inbound links to your site, I promise that some day you will see your site get recognized by Google. Once Google recognize your site, sooner or later, Yahoo and MSN will pick it up.

Platform Bed Press Release in Action

2006-09-06T09:40:00.000-07:00

As we know, when promoting a new site, writing an article is an cost-effective way to spread out the word. In an article, you need to raise a question and concern to your audiences and then provide a solution to the question. Most often, the solution you provided is a link back to your site or product and you articulate how your site or product can help them solve the question in real life.

Similar to writing an article, writing a press release is also a great way to advertise your site. Unlike writing an article, press release must be "newsworthy", which means it must generate interests to the media. Additionally, it should answer "what", "when", "where", "why" and "how".

To get more exposure to BestPlatformBeds.com, I decided to write a press release and with the help from my Wholesale Furniture Brokers, it goes live today. You can view the press release at Platform Bed Press Release Online. I attached a screen shot for your convenience.

In the google, yahoo and msn news section, this release already achieved a #1 position. Here is the screenshot:

Google News:

Yahoo News:

MSN News:

SEO Blog: A Google PR and Backlink Update

2006-07-22T11:59:00.000-07:00

As many of you have seen, Google did a PR update in July and a lot sites and pages therefore have experienced ups and downs of PR. Sadly, the PR of this blog dropped and I think the reason is because i am hosting this blog on blogger.com. A lot of discussions have been around talking about all the advantages and disadvantages of having blog on your own domain, i will not get into that topic here. What I care about is the PR of bestplatformbeds.com which has been boosted to 4, which is a pretty good PR for a site that has only been online for about 4 months. Other than the PR update, Google also updated the backlinks. If you do a link: www.domain.com you should see something different. I have seen updated backlinks to my site: Platform Beds Shopping Guide counted by Google. A lot of people complained about the fact Google does not show as many as backlinks as it is shown on Yahoo and MSN. Google does put more weight on the quality of your backlinks and the age of your backlinks. You also need to know that Google does not show all the backlinks they know of. So keep up your hard work and hopefully you will see increased PR and traffic to your site.

Place BuzzBooster on Your Site

2006-07-18T09:31:00.000-07:00

Whenever you start a blog, you should marry your blog to feeds . To let other people know immediately whenever you updated your blog and keep your readers become returning audiences, a feed would be the best solution at least for now. If you have a site or another domain, integrating blog to your site is a great way to promote your blog especially your blog is relevant to the topic of your site. You may even get returning audiences if they become interested in your blog.

I just found this great feature in feedburner called "buzzbooster". In general, BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed's content as go-anywhere HTML and you for your convenience, it gives you a snippet of JavaScript you can paste into your page templates. By filling variables, you can have full control over how many blog headlines you want to display on your page. As you update your blog, the content on your page will also get updated. You can view how that blog looks like on my site at Platform Bed Blog, and I also took a screenshot here:

To apply BuzzBooster, you need to set up an account at feedburner (you really should if you own a blog), and then click Your Feed-> Publicize -> BuzzBooster. Other than BuzzBooster, they have a lot of other cool features and I am sure you will be pleased with that.

Back To The First Page of MSN

2006-07-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

I don't think any of you would have noticed that the rank of the primary keyword Best Platform Bed was targeting－"platform bed" dropped to the 3rd page on MSN(I did not expect to get ranked well on Google, since there is a "sandbox" there). At that time, I reanalyzed the title, meta tags and keyword density of the top 10 sites on MSN and accordingly, I optimized my site again based on this analysis. However, the ranking remained the same and I started to get frustrated. I was telling myself to be "cool" and "let it go". What behind this "cool" is the fact that I am telling myself do not over optimize the site, which is to say that don't always change stuff like title, meta description, keyword density... these onpage factors whenever you see your site got dropped. Give the SE some time to pick up the changes and pray if you like....

Now, my site gets back to the first page on MSN if you do a search for the keyword "platform bed" on MSN. http://search.sympatico.msn.ca/results.aspx?q=platform+bed&geovar=56&FORM=REDIR

Look Beyond SERP on Yahoo

2006-06-28T11:16:00.000-07:00

Today, right after Google, Yahoo is one of the top sites on the internet, receiving over 345 million visitors every month and that's why webmasters are all trying their best to get a high ranking on Yahoo. Let's look beyond SERP, other than organic search, there are some other ways you can promote your business on Yahoo.

* Mobile Site Submission
* Podcast Submission
* Yahoo Directory Submission
* Media RSS Feeds
* Yahoo Answers

Mobile Site Submission
The code for creating a mobile web sites is either xHTML, WML, or cHTML. As there are way more cell phones today than computers, it is a good idea to prepare your web site to be easily viewable on cell phones. Thus, people can view your web as long as they carry their cell phones.
To get your mobile site indexed by Yahoo, enter the URL on their submission page. Only the top-level page is needed, the Yahoo Crawler will explore the rest of your site from there.

Podcast Submission
According to Information Week, podcast users are expected to reach 60 million by the year 2010. With these kind of numbers, it makes sense to start implementing podcasting into your own marketing strategy.

Yahoo released their podcast directory in 2005 and it is now one of the best places to submit your podcast and start picking up some extra subscribers. Simply go to http://podcasts.yahoo.com/publish to get started.

Yahoo Directory Submission
Unlike mobile and podcast submission, this one will cost you $299 a year(unless your site is not a commercial site). While there are benefits associated with getting listed on Yahoo directory. I really doubt whether it is worth paying that. For Yahoo directory submission, you have to use your business as the title of your site but not the one within the title tag, which is most often the keyword you want to target. So it is very likely that once you get your site listed, you will find that the ranking of your homepage on Yahoo (when you type the keyword you want your homepage to target) will likely to drop. So think it through before you decide to pay $299.

Media RSS
I think it is always fun to see a real person speaking or talking in front of the screen. Nowadays, other than only having plain text and images online, more and more site provided online audio and video for business promotion. As the variety of content has increased online, Yahoo has been continually adapting. They now allow you to search specifically for audio and video within their search engine. You can see my previous post for Wholesale Furniture Broker's online TV commercial.

If you are looking to increase your web site's traffic, creating audio and video content for your web site could be the answer.

To get your audio, video, and other visual content into Yahoo, you can submit it via a media RSS feed.

Yahoo Answers
Yahoo! Answers was launched on December 8, 2005. It is a community where anyone can ask questions and anyone can answer questions. When you search "XX" on yahoo, at the bottom of your search results, you probably will see "XX from Yahoo Answers" and it shows the recent questions asked by other people and it also shows how many people have provided the answer. If you feel like your site can provide clear answers, you can go ahead and tell the people who asked the question.

SEO Marketing: Add Del.icio.us to your blog/Site

2006-06-22T08:30:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard of Del.icio.us? If you did, are you taking advantage of that?
The following are excerpt from del.icio.us/about

"What is del.icio.us?"
del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. Use
del.icio.us to:

Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.
Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.
Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite - they've already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.

Add this to your site and if someone likes your content, he or she can save this to his or her favorite item. This works kinda like a RSS feed. What makes it more exciting is that once someone add it to his or her favorite, the tag will appear on the homepage of del.icio.us and if someone else there find the tag appealing, he or she can save it to his or her favorite. Thus, it is a great way for you to acquire one-way quality back links and to increase visibility. One of the advantages I can think of is that the majority of the time your tags will be removed from community members because the members are technically savvy and intolerant of any type of commercial push.

At this point, you might want to see a real example. Look at my blog and you will see "Save to del.icio.us", if you already had an account there, then you can click on it and add it to your favorite. What's more, if some people see your item is of great value to them, they can add this to their favorites off your list. (I am not triggering you to do that though.....)

Marketing SEO: 10 Ways to Promote Your Blog

2006-06-20T12:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I read a newsletter talking about promoting your blogs. It shows 10 blog tools that can help you market your blog. Personally, I think it is very helpful and I believe that you probably have known most of them. But there maybe always something you never thought of, so let us take a look:

10 Essential Blogging Tools
By John Jantsch (c) 2006

Feed Reader
The best way to learn about blogs and blogging is to read, or at least scan, lots of blogs. One of the wonders of blogs is that you can have every new post from every blog you want to read delivered to your desktop or to online location via RSS, so you can easily read and scan the posts of many blogs in a very short time. Newsgator is a good online choice for feed reading and also has a version that integrates with Outlook. I use a frëe online service known as Bloglines.

Subscriber Center
You need to make it easy for your blog visitors to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed – so they can read your blog in their favorite feed reader. The best way to do this is to go to FeedBurner and burn your own RSS feed there and use the tools they provide to set up automatic subscriber links so people who want to use Bloglines, Google Reader, MyYahoo or Pluck, for instance, can clíck on one button to subscribe. Tech types can figure this out without the buttons but why not make it easy for anyone to figure out.

Email Subscription
A lot of people will nevër get the whole feed thing, but everyone gets email. Create an option for people to subscribe by giving you their email address – they will simply receive your blog posts like an email message. FeedBurner offers this service for frëe. FeedBlitz is another option or, if you already have an autoresponder email list service they may offer this service. AWeber offers this and helps me integrate these blog email subscribers into my other mailing lists.

Blog and RSS directories
There are hundreds of blog and RSS directories and getting listed in many can be a good thing. I use a piece of software called RSS Submit , but you can also visit Robin Goode's frequently updated list and submit your blog and feed by hand. Hint: Subscribe to the RSS feed he offers and you will be notified when new directories are added.

Ping Service
Pinging is a term used for letting the various blog and RSS directories know when you have posted new content. Again, FeedBurner offers this as an automatic option called PingShot and you should activate it. PingGoat and Ping O Matic are other options but they require that you visit and update your record each time you post new content. Bookmark Manager

As you surf around the web or hop from blog to blog you may find sites that you want to point out to your readers. Online bookmark managers allow you to bookmark and categorize web and blog pages as you collect them and are a great tool for managing all of the stuff you find on the web. I use del.icio.us but BlinkList does a fine job as well.

Blog Stats
I like to track a few key stats in real time because it shows what other blogs might be linking to you or posting about your blog. A lot of people just like to track this kind of thing for fun and frequently visit sites like Technorati. I like to track it for networking opportunities. I use a tool called MyBlogLog because it allows me to see where traffïc is coming from but also tracks what links on my blog visitors are clicking on. It's amazing how this data can help you write more effectively. (MyBlogLog also ranks your links so visitors can see which links on your site are the most popular.)

Desktop Posting
With most blog software you must go online and post using a set of tools provided by the blog software. Many bloggers like to use a desktop application to create and submit their posts as it gives them some extra tools and allows them to more easily integrate content and files on their computer. I use w.blogger but also like Performancing, Qumana and ecto (apple folks) (w.blogger also doubles as a really simple HTML editor.)

Tell A Friend Script
My blog software (pMachine) has a feature that allows a reader to clíck a link and send the post to a friend. This tactic brings me lots of readers. You might try looking here for some simple scripts that do that same: http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/tellafriend.shtml http://www.stadtaus.com/en/php_scripts/tell_a_friend_script/

Republish Your Feed Headlines
The ability to republish your blog posts on other web pages, sites you own or sites of strategic partners is a great way to expose folks to your blog content. One more time we turn to FeedBurner for a painless way to republish your blog post to any web page you choose with something they call BuzzBoost.

Platform Bed Forum Goes Live

2006-06-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

After implementing some basic SEO techniques and with a high ranking on MSN, The traffic to www.bestplatformbeds.com has dramatically increased over the past two months. Therefore, I decide to take my site to another level by allowing a more open and easy interaction with my audiences. The easiest way for facilitating the interaction with my audiences i s to build a forum where the audiences can hang around and post any questions they have about platform bed. In this way, audiences can help each other and they can easily share their experiences with each other. In the forum, i also included a section just for platform bed manufacturer such as Lifestyle Solutions and Rizzon Furniture so that online shoppers will be informed quickly if there is any new styles available from the manufacturers.
To view my forum, please visit : Platform Bed Forum

This is a snapshot of my forum:

Online Marketing - Submit Your Video and Put On Your Site

2006-06-08T09:03:00.000-07:00

Other than some traditional online marketing techniques we have seen over the past 10 years, such as on page & off page optimization for top rankings, press release, PPC and online blogging, we are seeing more and more people adopt "multimedia" to get more exposure and response to their business and products.

Besides your favorite site for submitting the video and pod cast, you should definitely submit your video to Google and Yahoo. Additionally, you can get a code that you can simply put on your page and show the video on your site. Since the video is not on your server, so you do not need to worry about the possibility of slowing down your site. By adding a video and especially if a third party can be present and tell people about all the "cool" stuff of your business, you will be able to gain a lot more credibility than just putting plain text on the site.

Below is my sponsor's (as you probably already know - Wholesale Furniture Brokers) first TV commercial and I copy the video code from Yahoo so you can take a look at it. If you don't like it, just do not hit the "play" button.

Running Contest to Promote Your Site

2006-06-01T09:01:00.000-07:00

Bestplatformbeds.com's sponsor - Wholesale Furniture Brokers starts its official $3000 grand prize contest today in hope of generating more traffic.

As we know, there are many forms of online marketing tactics such as online blogging (what I am doing now), search engine optimization, ppc ads and even word of mouth. But some other forms of marketing can also be effective depends on the type of your online business and how you implement the strategy. Personally, I have never experimented tactics like sweepstakes, affiliate programs or contest to promote my site. So it will be interesting to see how they run it and promote this contest and what kind of result they will get. I am sure I will be able to learn something from this contest. They have issued a press release and you can take a look if you are interested. If you want to know more details about the contest or you want to learn something from this type of marketing, you can visit their contest page.

Write PR to Increase the Exposure of Bestplatformbeds.com

2006-05-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

If managed properly, PR can be a great way to bring more free traffic to your site. Thus, I decided to write a PR for my site http://www.bestplatformbeds.com/. But what do I mean when I mentioned “if managed properly”? Well, what I meant is that you need to know how to write a good PR and then promote it properly.

A press release is targeted toward journalists and reporters. It is not promotional in the least and provides facts about a product/service/event/topic. It should answer the reporter's question, "Why would my readers care about what you're saying?" Generally speaking, the purpose is to have the reporter use your release as-is, have him/her pull a quote from your release for a feature article they are writing or have them contact you for an interview.

In my press release, I answered questions such as the intention of creating the site, why platform bed have gained popularity in North America… etc. The following is the press release I wrote for http://www.bestplatformbeds.com/:

BestPlatformBeds.com launches in response to increasing demand for platform beds in North America.

Platform bed frames have risen in popularity across the nation due to the demand for quality, cost-efficient bedroom furniture. A new website, www.bestplatformbeds.com, launched in June of 2006, simplifies people's search by providing the answers to the most common questions about platform beds. The site does not sell beds but rather helps people make the right choices, providing information on how to shop for the beds online with links, pictures, comparisons and detailed information on brand name furniture.

"This site was created to answer two main questions I had on my mind while considering a new bed", notes Jeff Cai, webmaster and creator of bestplatformbeds.com. First, why do so many people suddenly prefer a platform bed over the larger, more traditional bed frames? The answer, according to his research, is simply that the platform bed frame can appeal to almost anyone, anywhere. The stylish frame, soft simple lines and sleek design can create a comfortable, minimalist look at an amazingly affordable price. The beds come in a variety of styles to fit almost any individual preference. "In our fashionably savvy world, it's not surprising that people today are shopping for a bed with a healthy mix of comfort, style and durability", notes Cai. Like all furniture, opinions on what to buy can vary from person to person. "If you like simplicity, you get a low profile bed with no footboard and possibly not even a headboard", Jeff Cai explains, "For the space conscious, a storage platform bed could be your best choice, omitting the need for a dresser or chest to take up your limited room".

While the reason for choosing a platform bed based on style can be clear, the second question asks why more and more people are shopping for platform beds online. "The answer is the purpose for bestplatformbeds.com", according Jeff Cai. It should be no surprise that most online shoppers are trying to find a better price and a wide range of choices. Despite all the pretty pictures and price wars you find between online furniture stores, a growing majority of shoppers are first searching for valuable information to make better decisions. "This is exactly what bestplatformbeds.com is here for", says Cai, "People are not shopping for platform beds online as much as they are first trying to research platform beds online". Again, bestplatformbeds.com is not a commercial website that sells platform beds but rather a content-driven web page devoted to providing useful information to help shoppers make better decisions while researching platform beds online. As Jeff Cai have reiterated, bestplatformbeds.com is not a commercial site and hence we would like to know how this site make money? “This site started on a part-time basis and as the traffic grows, I’ve realized that it will one day generate a small profit from Sponsorship Advertising.” Jeff Cai Replied. When asked what criteria were used when considering various different online stores, Jeff Cai replied “First, I will conduct a research on Google and I will prepare a list of the online stores that sells platform bed. Then I will visit each site and when I evaluate each store, I will take factors such as the store credibility, how secure it is to order on that store, the shipping policy, return policy and price into consideration. While there are so many factors to consider, I generally would give precedence to the security issue and the credibility of store. So far, I have found stores, some of which are Wholesale Furniture Brokers, Affordable-Beds.com and FurnitureEsuperstore where I believe customers can get a wide range of choices of platform beds and quality services.

When asked where he sees this site going, Jeff Cai replied “Since this site was launched seeing the growing popularity of platform bed in North America, I would hope that this site could serve as a window to let more and more people to know the benefits platform bed and eventually accept platform bed. Therefore, in a few years, I may launch a Chinese version of with the domain of bestplatformbeds.com.cn in hope of bringing platform bed into East Asian’s daily life.

To view the website’s overall design and format, please visit http://www.bestplatformbeds.com/.
If you operate an online business that carries platform beds and would like more information on having your commercial website and it's products reviewed and listed, simply email Jeff Cai at info@bestplatformbeds.com.

About the Company:
BestPlatformBeds.com provides detailed information on different styles of platform beds as well as price comparisons of online platform bed stores.

Contact Information:
Jeff Cai
info@bestplatformbeds.com

SEO for Google

2006-05-06T23:13:00.000-07:00

Continuing from our last two lessons - SEO for MSN and SEO for Yahoo, I am going talk about SEO for Google today.

Google, as probably all of you already know, I don't even need to mention that Google is currently the largest of all the search engines It is estimated that Google is responsible for 42.7% of all online searches in March of 2006. For this reason people tend to view Google as the engine to rank on.

So again, based on my experience, observation and research the major factors include:

Backlinks

Content

How it fares in the results

Backlinks

More than on either Yahoo or MSN, backlinks are of special importance to Google. More importantly, Google's methods for calculating the weight of backlinks is very different than either of the other two engines. As I've noted before, if you do a search "link:www.yourdomain.com" on 3 different search engines, most likely, you will find that Google count the least backlinks. Probably you've already heard that Google only count your backlinks if the site that links to you has a PR higher than 4, but actually this is not true. The key factors that determine the value of a link in regards to its contributions to the ranking of your site are:

The age of the links - The longer your links have been on a web page, the higher that value is. Basically this means that your link building efforts today aren't going to pay off right away.

The location of the link - The physical location of your link on the page is an indicator to Google of it's value. The link that appears near the top of the site weights more than the link that appears near the bottom of the page.

The anchor text and formatting - The linking text used is obviously important. If you are targeting a phrase such as "platform beds" then using these two keywords in the anchor text is going to attach relevancy between your site and these keywords. Be careful though, you shouldn't use the same anchor text over and over again since that would be considered spamming by search engines.

Relevancy - The relevancy of the site linking to you is of key importance. For example, a site with the title "Platform Bed Sale" links to me counts more than a site with the title "bedroom furniture". You should also know that relevancy is not only determined by the title of the site, some other factors such as content, meta tags also come into play.

PageRank - No need for more explanation, a link from a PageRank of 6 is worth substantially more than a link from a PageRank 1 page

Age

Content

How it fares in the results

SEO for Yahoo

2006-04-30T15:36:00.000-07:00

Last time, we've talked SEO for MSN. Today, Let's take a look at Yahoo, which is considered as the second largest search engine right after Google (Which I will talk about in my next lesson).
The algorithm of Yahoo is based on Inktomi that Yahoo purchased in 2002 as part of their plan to stop serving Google results to search queries. The major ranking factor for Yahoo include:

Keyword Density

Site Structure

Aging Delay

Link Popularity

Keyword Density

As noted in the article on MSN, it would be unwise to specify a keyword density for you to target on your website. You may want to use some SEO tools to find out about an average value of keyword density for the sites ranked in the top 10 places in Yahoo. As far as I am concerned, to rank well on Yahoo, you should have a relatively higher keyowrd desity than the situation you want to optimize for Google. But again, keep in mind, always put your audience in the first place, don't just put keyword there to increase the density where it does not make any sense to your audience.

Site Structure
On no other engine is site structure more important than on Yahoo! While having a good site structure is important for a vaiety of reasons, it was on Yahoo!

The site structure is important for two key reasons. First, the site structure determines the order in which your page content gets seen by Yahoo and hence, content that occurs higher up in the code of your page (not necessarily in your browser) is given a higher weight than content lower down in the code. Second, a properly structured site will be lower in code through the use of CSS, reduced or eliminated table use, etc. The reduction in code will push the content higher up the page as far as a search engine is concerned and thus, it will be given more weight.

Aging Delay
Many focus on Google's "sandbox" when they think of aging delays however Yahoo! employs one as well, though it is lighter and lasts a shorter duration of time. New sites and links are not given the same weight as sites and links that have been around for a while. New sites can expect to find it extremely difficult to rank for competitive phrase inside of 6 months. You can look at my site as an example. As I mentioned in my previous lesson, my targeted keyword "platform bed" get ranked 3rd on MSN while nowhere to be found on Yahoo.

Link Popularity
Of the 3 search engines, Google consider backlinks as one of the most important factors when place your site for organic search; thus, I will leave this factor in my next lesson.

SEO for MSN

2006-04-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

Well, Let's hear some good news. I found that my site www.bestplatformbeds.com get ranked pretty well on MSN for the major keywords I was targeting - "platform bed" and "platform beds". But when I did a search on Yahoo and Google, It ranked probably somewhere around 150. So what is all the fuss about? Let's see explorer how these 3 search engines determine the ranking a site and the differences of the algorithm. (Based on my observation and my search)

MSN:
On site:

the quality of content

the internal linking structure of the site (how the pages of your site are linked together)

the number of pages in your site and the relevancy of those pages to your main topic and phrases

Title, headings and meta tags
keyword density

The quality of the content referring to the attractiveness of your content both to search engines and your audiences. If you content is unique, of great value to your audiences (attractive to your audience), have at least 200 words, and have your targeted keywords stressed(attractive to search engine), then you are in good shape.

The internal linking structure referring to how the pages of your site are linked together. For example, if I have a page that is targeting "platform bed store", then I need to use this text link in most of my pages and make it "visible" to the search engine. If any of those pages have good Page rank, then it adds value to my "platform bed store" page.

For MSN, Title, headings and meta tags hold a very high level of weight in the algorithm. The proper use of your page title, H1 and H2 headings and meta descriptions (most search engines today ignore meta keywords) can get you a good spot on MSN if you also managed your off page factor well.

Off page:

With MSN, the off site factors are much simpler to deal with than either Google or Yahoo! If you do a link search for all the three search engines, you will probably find that MSN count the most links for you. For my platform beds site, MSN count 29 back links, Yahoo count 10 while Google say I don't have any back links pointing to my site.

Since offpage factor weights more in Yahoo and Google, I will devel into this topic in my next lesson when I talk about Yahoo and Google.

SEO Vs Usability - All about Content

2006-04-08T16:04:00.000-07:00

In the old days, we've learned all the tricks for SEO, such as include keyword in your h1 or h2, bold, italic your keyowrd, have a proper keyword density on your page. But, have you ever thought that what if some of the things you do does not make too much sense to your audiances? In that case, do you still want to keep them to make search engine happy? In my opinion, content should be created that is intented to make your audiance happy, not search engines. Keep in mind, if your audiance like it, finally search engine will like it too!

Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Usually, you may think of having a content that is no less than 200 words. Search engines may have problems to find out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, and ultimately penalising that page in the search rankings. In my website, http://www.bestplatformbeds.com On most of my pages, I have content created that explains clearly and concisly to our audiance what is this page about and what value / information can they get in the this page. In addition, take the file size into account, becasue you don't want your visitors to wait for 20 secs for downloading your page.

SEO-lesson: Should I Change My URL?

2006-04-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I just came across an article talking about optimizing onpage factors. One of the factors the article mentioned about is the way naming your URL. When I created my site 2 months ago, for consistence, i used all underscores for my subpages; for example, for my platform bed store page, i named it bestplatformbeds.com/platform_bed_store.php But according to that article, hypen is better than underscore becasue most search engines treat hypen as space, so to search engine, a hypen will be like "platform bed store". Unless you are targeting the keyword "platform_bed_store" then it is better to use underscore in your url.
Just when I want to change my URL and use 301 redirect for my pages, I got some other advice from the forum that changing URLs should only, only, only be done for a really, really, really good reason and in my case it will be like SEO suicide. URL has a minimum effect on your ranking, if any at all! Just want to share with whoever considering change the URL without a very very very good reason.

SEO no-no: Things you should avoid

2006-03-26T16:40:00.000-08:00

There was times when people trying to trick the search engines and it worked for a while. But these old tatics that worked well before should never be used today. I am going to talk the strategies that you should stay away from.

some on page strategies:

hidden text
alt image spamming
meta tag stuffing

other than on page strategies you should avoid, there are some off page optmization strategies that you should avoid:

Don't exchange links with a site that has "farm links".

Don't use outbound link to site that is penalized by google.

Link exchange with a site that irrelevant to your site will not help you but may harm you.

SEO Lesson: Use a CSS-driven Design

2006-03-23T14:18:00.000-08:00

Guess what!! Just a few 1 week ago, my site bestplatform beds.com only have 1 page indexed by Google but when I check it today, I have 29 pages indexed now!! I am so happy and I know that I should thank for the CSS design. When I first started my platform beds site, I used java script for creating my lovely top navigation buttons. Sure it really looks nice and attracting with all the rollover effect. With a bunch of java scritp there, poor Google bots can not find all my sub pages. So I decided to use CSS to redesign my navigation system. After redesigning with CSS, I am still be able to create the same stunning effect but more importantly, it makes all my sub pages "visible" to search engines.
Just a slight change can really makes a big difference. You can see my new CSS-driven site: Platform Bed

SEO lesson- Don't follow SEO Content Optimization

2006-03-21T09:16:00.000-08:00

When talking about SEO, alsmot every one knows what should he/she do to create a title, keyword, description and page content that is SEO-driven. We know the the common tricks such as using keywords, using H1 headings, or using bold font to stress your keywords. However, when constructing our page content, what we should focus on is our targeted audiance instead of search engine. If you get too obbsessed with SEO, you may tend to place and stress your keywords in places even though it does not make much sense to do so. In one word, our content should be sales-driven or customer focused instead of SEO-driven. Some gereral guidelines you should follow when creating your page content:

Know your targeted audiance, always!
If possible , make emotional appeal
Place keyword where it make sense to your audiance
Make it flow!
Spell out the benefits instead of just listing features of your products

As search engines getting more and more smart, they won't just simply look at how many times does your keyword appear in your content. If your audiance like your content and your content convert to sales, search engine will also tend to favor your content more than the content stuffed with keywords.

SEO Lesson-Quality Inbound Links

2006-03-10T13:44:00.000-08:00

What is inbound links? It is the link that points to your site from another site. Google and other search engines will take quality inbound links into account when determining how imporatnt or relevant your site is to a specific keyword you are targeting. The more inbound links you have, your site will be more valuable to search engines.
However, be careful, these links need to be "quality" inbound links. What do we mean by quality here. A site might provide quality inbound links to you if it meets the following criterion:
1. The page is well designed and is informative
2. It has a decent PR
3. It is relevant to the content on your page
4. The links that provided from his site must not be far from its home page level
5. You are in control of how your link can be displayed, otherwise, they may make your link "invisible" to search engines.

As with inbound links, we also have the concept "outbound" links, it is not as important as inbound links to search engines, but I will talk about it tomorow anyway.

SEO Lesson-Manage your dynamic page URL

2006-03-09T13:19:00.000-08:00

What does people mean when refering to "dynamic web page"?? It is not about something "dynamic" as we might think, such as rotating image, some flash. Here, "dynamic" simply means the web page is connected with a database and some other language other than html is required, such as php and asp. Since we are talking about SEO, we will not get into detail thses server-side language.
Now, suppose my url looks like this:
http://www.bestpaltformbeds.com/platformbed/retrobed.php ---this is fine to any search engines

http://www.bestplatformbeds.com/platformbed/retrobed.php?png=2---This is still ok, at least with some of the search engines

http://www.bestplatformbeds.com/platformbed/retrobed?&ID=2234=CAD&=ID_97
Now, this kind of URL will cause me some trouble. A lot of parameters are contained in this URL. Thus, this page may not get indexed by Google or even if it get indexed, it would not get ranked in the top 30. So how can we get it fixed?
1. Modify URL so they does not look like they are pointing to dynamic pages. You can achieve that by removing some special characters such as #, !, ?, * and reducing the number of parameters.

2.Use URL rewrite trick---- you can look more in detail here httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Create Navigation Systems that Search Engines Can Read

2006-03-08T13:46:00.000-08:00

When building your navigation system, make sure search engines can "read" it. Sometimes, what we want to do is to use rollover effects or flash buttons to make make it looks fancy and "high-class". However, if you create your navigation system in that way, it will be invisible to search engines. Because usually these techniques requires the use of Java script, which is something that seach engine robot will ignore. If you do want to use Java scripts to create some eye-catching effects, then follow some tips below:
1. Make sure you have the text link appear on some other places in the same page
2. Don't throw all your Java script into one page, make an external file to store the script, and use php code point to the files that contain the Java scripts. (I also have a blog talking about php)
3.When you use images as buttons, make sure write the corresponding alt tag for image

In some other cases, you may want to block search engine robots crawling your page when you have a page that is under construction or that page is only for internal uses, then you use the following code:
META NAME=”robots” CONTENT=”noindex, nofollow”
here, noindex means don't index the page and nofollowing means don't follow any of the links in this page.

2006-03-07T19:15:00.000-08:00

Where to put the keyword "platform bed"?

2006-03-07T14:12:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I talked about how to find your approriate keyword. Now it is the time to place the keyword. So for my site Bestplatformbeds.com, where would I put the keyword "platform bed"? Generally, there are 3 places where we can put the keyword. First, I will put "platform bed" on my page title, this is one of the places that search engine gets clue what your site is about. Second, and obviously, I will put the keyword in my meta keywords, 10-15 will be an approriate amount. Third, I will put in meta description. In meta description, try to write the most concise and keyword-heavy sentence that describe the site, and it usually should be less than 30 words. Other than the above 3 common place, URL can be another place you should target on. For example, if I have a page for platform bed design(actually I do), I will name the URL http://bestplatformbeds.com/platform-bed-design

Find an approriate keyword for you

2006-03-06T13:57:00.000-08:00

A lot of companies have no idea (they usually think they do though) on how to pick keywords. Of course, the first we need to know is that what keyword that most people is searching for. A easy way to check is to use keyword selector tool . You can type a relevant keyword in the box and search to see how many people are searching this keyword. So for my bestplatformbeds.com, i would try to use "platform bed", "best bed", "platform bed design", "build platform bed". Thus, whatever comes the first may be the one that i will focus on when developing my meta tags. Here i used the word "maybe" because another strategy is to try to target niche keyword since you won't have many competitors and thus you will have a greater chance to get ranked higher.

Be careful, don't stuff the keyword as you may be considered as spamming by search engines.

For separating different keywords, you can use either space or comma.

Other than using that keyword selector tool, you can also follw the tips below:

1. Find obvious keyword(for mine, of course it is platform bed)
2. Look at the web site's access log
3. Brainstorm with your colleagues

Bestplatformbeds.com- A Real Case for SEO

2006-03-06T13:26:00.000-08:00

Hello, Everyone

For any of you who owns a website, SEO undoubtedly will be a challenging and ongoing subject. SEO is not only a job, a task, but also an art, i would say. There are a lot of theroies around the web you can look for. But personally i think some of them are not well written or just throwing everything there. In here, I will share my experience and my understanding about SEO. I just have my site Bestplatformbeds.com up and thus this will be a real case for me to implenment SEO strategies.

Every week, I will talk about each area in SEO, maybe a lot of the stuff you already know, but hopefully you will still find something useful. Let's together rock Google and Yahoo