ISULONG SEOPH

SEO Philippines founder, Marc Macalua, announced the launching of his latest SEO contest, the Bayanihan SEO contest. Bayanihan in Filipino roughly means “cooperation”. And true to its meaning, the contest is all about cooperation. Contestants will be competing in teams which they themselves form. So watch out for teams of superstars. The prizes are not too shabby at Php 600,000 (roughly $13,300).

Marc and the rest of the contest organizers are still accepting sponsors. Being one of the sponsors mean you get tons of linkbacks from competing sites. And judging from the previous SEO contest by Marc, the number of competing sites linking to yours is not to be underestimated.

Ask anybody who calls themselves SEO whether reciprocal linking is good or bad and you’ll get almost instantaneously a “it’s bad” response. Yes, reciprocal linking is considered bad. I’m not talking one or two reciprocal links. It’s somewhere around tens to hundreds of links.

Try getting 100 reciprocal links and search engines will flag you as link farming. But what about those big network blogs. Say, B5 Media or Gawker Media. Visit one of their member blog and take a look at their sidebar. Count how many links to their other member sites/blog are there. Is that link farming?

They’re all interlinking with each other. They’re reciprocal links. Now wonder, it’s easy for them to get to PR 7. But should they be penalized? Of course. Are they? I don’t know. Now, if they can get away with it with their uber popular blogs, maybe we can too. Hmmm. I would like to experiment on this one.

I have a couple of sites listed in DMOZ. I was ecstatic when I learned one of my site was approved for listing in DMOZ. Two other sites follow, thereafter. Even my personal site is listed in DMOZ even though I didn’t remember submitting it for listing in the popular engine.

Does DMOZ still has that X-factor that made it hugely popular and most sought-after web directory? Google has recently took away Pagerank from their homepage. I’m not sure if it’s the same story with their inside pages. Not that pagerank is all that important. Google could still be giving them special treatment sans the pagerank but it’s the pagerank that sells them most, followed by exclusivity.

To satisfy my curiosity on how link/web directories work, I created one. Mix Directory my free human-edited link directory. It’s not very clear to me, however, if link directories are still being considered by search engines, but being a SEO practitioner (a little), this is all part of an experiment.

I don’t expect a lot of listing in Mix Directory since it only has a pagerank of zero at the moment. I have already sent some link love to it from some of my sites. It’ll have a bit of that green “google dust ” next pagerank update.

There’s only one problem I have with it now. My categories are so disorganized. I’ll be looking for a pre-made category list later and make myself comfortable with my directory program’s admin interface.

I got one of my ads disapproved today. The display URL was different from the destination URL. I forgot about the domains of both URLs must be the same. I am promoting a product from linkshare.

Also, I just lowered the bid of one adgroup due to non converting clicks. Two more days and I’ll pull the ad. I’m learning here.

I started venturing into internet affiliate marketing today. I don’t know if it’s tough luck but today, Google also released a bunch of their online advertising products. One of which is a Cost-Per-Action (CPA) advertising.

You may call it lack of foresight on my side but not being a real SEO/SEM, I’m out of touch with these improvements. I’m doing what most affiliates are doing. Signing up with affiliate sites like CJ or clickbank. Google’s new product compete directly with those kind of programs. It won’t take long before sites selling stuff goes directly to google. Currently they do it through cj or clickbank in order for their products to reach critical mass using adwords. And it’s affiliate marketers who does those.

With google’s CPA program, online retailers won’t be exposed to fraud as much as before when they pay per click. I’m afraid affiliate marketers will be bypassed in the near future.

Last year was the year spent learning new things. Lots of them. This year, it’s time to put in good use all those new stuff crammed inside my head for a year.

We were able to reach the threshold of a SEO project started late last year. For now, we’re facing a blank wall as to what other things to add that’ll give more value to tools our users pay for. We’re starting to go into maintenance mode. I’m beginning to get bored. Only a little though. Not very much.

We’re launching a new site. An offshoot of the previously mentioned project. One of the tools got so much potential to stand on its own. Good. Again, not really. As I’ve said, it was an offshoot. Meaning, much of it is already done. We’re just moving it own domain for it to get it’s own paying users.

After a year of learning SEO from somebody who’ve actually done it and was labelled negatively for it might make you think I know a lot already. Wrong. After a year of learning SEO, I discovered I never learned anything. Every personal site experiment I did SEO for that got positive results were due to unexplained circumstances. I was just being lucky.

Site PR boosts, SERPs climb, traffic increased… All were circumstantial. I did nothing special. It’s the main reason why I’ll avoid joining SEO contests again.

This year, I’ll try to learn affiliate marketing. I think I like selling.

My boss and I had a discussion over dinner about current trends in Search Engine Optimation. Various techniques came up including those that still work and those that are obsolete. Nope, blackhat was out of the question. Our shop don’t do blackhat. We’re optimizing real online business. Actually, we are more on the marketing side and only do optimization as one of the component of marketing.

Yes, we focus more on marketing sites rather than optimizing sites. Not to say we don’t optimize our sites, we do, as long as it will not take our sites off search engine indexes. What good can your uber-optimized site when it won’t appear in search results?

Anyway, it is common nowadays to think of Google first when search is mentioned. It is perhaps due to the fact that before google search engine optimization wasn’t this competitive. Now, you compete with google and other SEOs gunning for the same niche. Now you should have a well defined strategy whereas we can just have lots and lots of pages with keywords stuffed in every available space they have.

Today, when everybody is doing the same thing that you do to optimize your page, you should have a way to do it differently and effectively. Determine the saturation point of your inbound links, for instance. Just how much inbound links do you need just to go up 1 spot in SERPs. Can the link buying expenses be justified by the increase in revenue for that 1 levelup? If not leave it that way and look in other places. Link out for instance. Make it natural. Who knows search engines have a way to determine link greedy sites. Yeah, there must be an algo like that somewhere? Spending is one area where online marketing differs from plain dumb optimization.

Now you know why my isulong seoph entry suck. I suck as a SEO.

Only a month and a half is left for the isulong seoph sites to put themselves in the first page of google search for the phrase isulong seoph. I’ve been stucked in page 5 of the SERP when I checked this morning. Frankly, I don’t expect to get near page 1.

I’m much comfortable at isulong seoph page 5. My attempt was futile. I am concluding this early that on-page will have no match really against off-page. But then again in real world SEO, dirty tactics can be made to get that spot we’ve alway wanted. And my be is still on on-page optimization.

Why on-page? There are just too little dependency on other sites. I’m not risking having use a technique that used to legal in the eyes of google but becomes illegal after google declared them to be abused too much. Isulong SEOPH did taught me alot about when to use and when not to use a technique.

In real world, I won’t risk using blackhat technique. Especially when the competition for that niche/keyword is hot. You’re only inviting to be delisted in the index and lose that precious spot and money.

Just with everything I do in life, I try to be clean a I can be. Just follow what is right by convention. In the end winning is not everything.

My on-page optimization failed to stand up against the huge number of inbound links other isulong seoph site generate. Really, this just proves that on-page of optimization cannot win against off-page.

For what google have shown so far in its result page, all sites on the first page have massively off-page optimized. Those who chose the on-page optimization that enjoyed top placement during the first couple of weeks into the isulong seoph contest are nowhere to be found today. I’m in the boundary of fourth and fifth page.

My little experiment ends here.

But you see, I have no complaints. Due to the contest, I managed to have another PR5 site. I was planning to delete this before the PR increase. But with a PR like this, it’s hard not to take advantage of it. Text link ads are hot these days. I see no reason not to sell link ads here. In the end, even if I lagged behind the contest, I still feel like a winner. Link ads, anyone?