Why is Search Engine Optimization Important to Filipino Entrepreneurs?
By the way, you might want to learn FREE Internet Marketing Basics (You know, so you can sell stuff online)
Like it or not, the Internet is slowly creeping up into our lives. Businesses that are not ready might just be left behind by the trends that have been coming up. One important trend is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).SEO is basically one of the latest online marketing methods. It generally means putting your website on top of the search rankings for Google, MSN, Yahoo and other major search engines.
According to research, people who use search engines generally just stay on the first page of the search results. Just think about it, when you type a keyword in google.com, how many times have you clicked on one of the first 5 links listed?
SEO is very important for online entrepreneurs since it could give their website a lot of traffic. An online store with a lot of visits would surely gain more purchases. It would definitely get a lot more income compared to another e-store that?s way below the search rankings.
Is this really Imporant?
For example, I searched for ?SEO Philippines? on google and found Marc Macalua?s personal blog on the subject. Marc was able to get to the top of the search results through a lot of his own research on SEO. He also has a more formal website - www.seophilippines.org for anything related to SEO, which was top 3 on my search results page.
Since Marc?s website was on the top of the list, I naturally clicked on it. I saw their website, found valuable information and became a member of the site?s yahoogroup. In effect, this was already a successful conversion for him. This is akin to getting a customer for an online store. If Marc had been selling a personal ebook on SEO, I might have bought one.
I’m already optimized!
Some might say, “Well… my website is already search-engine optimized.” In some cases, this is true. The best examples of this are companies that already have a popular brand name. Search for “Nike” on google would lead you a results page with NIKE’s company website on first spot.
Now think about this, what if a user didn’t know about the NIKE brand. Say he/she is in some part of the world where Nike has not been heard of. This person just wants to look for shoes.
Type “shoes” on google.com and notice the first search result is www.shoes.com. Nike is not even in the first page search results.
Another example: My friend has a website called karitela.com. They proudly advertise on their site that they are the number one search result once a user looks for the keyword “karitela.” Well that would be well and good, but are they really hitting their target market?
They are actually a bakeshop. Would a user, looking for bread or bakeshop, type in the word “karitela?” Karitela is actually similar to a horse-drawn cart.
How to make it to the top of the Search Results
There are a lot of articles about SEO online. Authors indicate a number of important factors when optimizing a website - including the content and structure of the website’s copy and page layout, the HTML meta-tags and the submission process.
One basic tip I just learned today was to look at a website?s source code and have it optimized. Every website you see online has already been formatted so that it would be easy to look at. Behind it is a source code with all those HTML tags. It seems that search engines see all those HTML tags inside a page and finds all the important keywords. If there are a lot of garbage there, then the Search Engines would have a tougher time categorizing the website.
Another tip I learned was to have less images and animation and more text. If a web page contains only Images and Flash Animation, the search engines would not be able to get a good idea of what the page was about. It would almost certainly rank much, much lower.
It’s an Art
Making it to the top of the search results lists, in my opinion, is really a bit of an art form. The truth is, we don?t know the exact formula that Google, MSN or Yahoo is using to determine SEO promotion. What the SEO experts do is to use known conventions like making sure that the topic is actually relevant. At times, people try to deconstruct the algorithms of the developers of the search engines and figure out a way to make it work for them.
One suggested way is to work with tools like wordtracker ? which gives users statistical info on top, searched keywords. Using it could give one insights on what keywords could work with a website. I tried using it for a while and gave me some interesting finds.
For example, 2 weeks ago, the keywords “pinoy ako” were very, very popular. If I understood the wordtracker explanations correctly, these keywords were searched an average of 126 a day in the last 100 days. What is even more fascinating is the fact that there were NO websites with those two exact words together. There was no competition.
Now if we applied this knowledge, an online entrepreneur could probably put a lot of ?PINOY AKO? keywords on this website, sell something related, or put a lot of adsense links, and probably earn a lot of money.
That?s a simplistic way of viewing it. If it were really that simple then we?d probably all going for the next Internet keyword gold rush.
Think backwards
A more practical viewpoint would probably to think backwards and find out why those keywords became popular. Think about what motivates those searchers to put ?pinoy ako? in google.
Well the first thing that came to my mind was the song ?Noypi? by a popular Philippine rock band called Bamboo. The chorus of the song goes ?HOY! pinoy ako buo aking loob may agimat ang dugo ko.? This roughly translates to something like: ?Hey, I?m a Filipino, confident, with an enchanted blood…?
Needless to say, it is a rather patriotic song that a lot of the teenaged Filipinos relate to. The song became quite popular in the past months. I have a strong suspicion that the interest in the song drove the large number of keyword searches for ?pinoy ako.? I would think that these people were actually looking for the lyrics of the song.
Knowing this, what would have been good items to sell to the people who looked for those keywords? MP3? Mp3 players? IPods?
In this case, to be able to get the sale through, a website definitely has to be search-engine optimized to at least stand a chance in the market. Nowadays, the keywords ?Pinoy Ako? already have many search results. This just tells us that SEO can be quite a chore. Websites probably need to be always optimized, depending on the
search trends.
Now just think about this, there are a lot of Philippine websites out there. How many have actually been Search-Engine optimized? I doubt there are a lot. If an entrepreneur could get ahead of his peers on this, then his/her website could just might be at the top of Google/MSN/Yahoo searches.
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