Why is Search Engine Optimization Important to Filipino Entrepreneurs?
Note: This original article was published on www.jozzua.com last February 27, 2006. It has been edited and rewritten by the author for distribution. The author grants you the right to copy, redistribute, and reprint this article on other websites as long as the original text is kept intact, the author is duly recognized and the link to www.jozzua.com is preserved. You may remove this top note and leave the bottom footer if you wish to republish it in a website. Alternatively, you can download the SEOPinoyEntreps PDF Article.]
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 SEO really Important?
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 were 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.
Another example would be this ecommerce website – www.pcsforeveryone.com. It is among the top search engine results when a person searches for “custom computers.” The company behind it has heavily invested in getting to the top of this keyword because it is estimated to be queried (based on wordtracker) around 250 times every 24 hours. Needless to say, they are earning a LOT from the website.
I’m already optimized!
Some might say, “Well… my website is already search-engine optimized.” In some cases, this is true. Examples would be 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: Some websites I’ve worked with are www.jt-multicraft.com, www.cbcfashion.com, and www.pfebrushart.com. When they advertise, they will probably say, we’re on the top of the search engines when you search for “jt-multicraft”, “cbcfashion”, or “pfebrushart”. Unfortunately, people might not know about their company brand and may be searching for something else.
What if their target market were looking for native crafts? Would they come up? With some tweaking and experimentation, I was able to get one of them to be within the first results page for the keywords “Philippine Native Crafts.”
Potential clients might not know the company’s names. They’ll just be searching for suppliers and use many different keywords that they would figure as relevant. SEO becomes more important in these cases.
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. In the Philippines, SEO has gained in popularity due to the SEO Philippines contest.
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 is a lot of garbage there, then the Search Engines would have a tougher time categorizing the website. I often use this SEO tool from Sitening to help me determine the SEO quality of the websites I make.
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. So it would be a very good idea to have dummy links within the html part of any flashy website.
I was able to get the Jt-multicraft website to the first Google results page for the keywords “Philippine Native Crafts” simply by creating a basic html landing page. This was a simple html file that I validated for SEO and submitted within the website’s domain. After that, I submitted this landing page in Google, Yahoo and MSN. I made around 4-5 backlinks from other websites I handled. The landing page was uploaded last May 11, 2006. By today, May 26, I was able to get it to the first search engine results page.
Some Tools for SEO
There is Add-On software for the Firefox browser called SEOpen. This tool provides me with some information to help with search engine optimization. It includes info on Google backlinks, Yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar. You need FireFox 1.5+ to install this addon. When you right-click and choose ‘mass check’, tabs will open to show you all the links pointing to your website from Google, Yahoo, MSN and Alexa.
Backlinks, or one-way links pointing to your websites are quite valuable. It is said that Google actually somewhat measures the value of websites through backlinks. You can gauge the value of a website through PageRank. You could install the Google Toolbar on your browser and get information about a website’s pagerank.
Art or Science?
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 and getting links from other websites.
Experts often 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 (wordtracker.com) – which gives users statistical info of 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.
Around January 2006, I discovered that 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.
Around February 2006, I keyed in “Tagalog” as a keyword that I wanted to analyze. Look at some of the results:
Keywords —————————————–KEI
“custom barong tagalog for sale” ———–144.000
“custom barong tagalog wholesale” ——–144.000
There were many other references to “barong tagalog.” The phrase “custom barong tagalog for sale” is estimated to be queried an average of 14 times in 24 hours in the past 100 days before February 2006.
As you can see above, the KEI for both sets are 144. KEI stand for Keyword Effectiveness Index. The higher the KEI, the more it is searched for and less competition it has. The KEI is not as high as “Jollibee philippines” – which had an amazing KEI rating of 2139.813. Anything higher than KEI 10 is considered significant.
What does this tell us? It seems that there is a market online for barong tagalog. I have a hunch that this maybe an international market. Perhaps the Filipinos abroad are looking for “barong tagalog’?
According to Wikipedia:
“A Barong Tagalog (or simply Barong) is an embroidered formal garment of the Philippines. It is very lightweight and worn untucked, similarly to a coat. It is the common wedding and formal attire for Filipino men. Barong Tagalog literally means “Tagalog dress” in the Tagalog language.”
Just think about this. If these keywords are searched 14 times per day, and you could sell even just one “barong tagalog” worth P5000. (High end barongs are around this price range.) That’s already around P150,000 in 30 days. Take note, however, that the search is for “custom” barongs. We wonder what “custom” means. Does it refer to tailor-fit clothes? Or perhaps it refers to those with custom designs?
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 be at the top of Google/MSN/Yahoo searches. That is a big international market. We all better start reading more about SEO.
[Note: This original article was published on www.jozzua.com last February 27, 2006. It has been edited and rewritten by the author for distribution. The author grants you the right to copy, redistribute, and reprint this article on other websites as long as the original text (including this note) is kept intact, the author is duly recognized and the link to www.jozzua.com is preserved. For those who plan to republish this on their websites, you may remove the NOTE after the title and just leave this one as article footer. You can download the SEOPinoyEntreps PDF Article.
Jozzua currently works for Amphiltech. He is currently marketing Philippine E-commerce Services to exporters and is doing web marketing work for selected clients. ]
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