1st Iloilo SEO Conference Hype Video

Now that the event is over and I have heard it was successful even if some people were late. I assume the content and lessons learned made up for the situation.

Now not being at the event, of course I am interested in the presentations of the speakers, and I found 3 good presentations on Facebook, that I believe need to be promoted more simply because of the content they are sharing. Take a look at these presentations below.

Mark Acsay’s Post Penguin Strategies

For those already in the SEO industry for some time may be bored with the brief history slides, but just continue to move on until you reach the real meat. He talks about being natural or evergreen and trying to avoid signatures of being unnatural that Google may be keeping track of. If you have any comments on his presentation, why not leave him some feedback on his blog.

Kim Tyrone Agapito’s Advanced Keyword Research, LSI Mastery and Authoritative Content Theming

In a nutshell for me keyword research is looking for the right words for your content and you based this on a number of factors, from search volume, competitiveness, relevancy, conversion etc. And LSI is simply using synonyms, similar words and related words. But Kim just explains the concepts well and sites a variety of examples as well as points out a number of tools you can possibly use. He hasn’t posted this presentation yet on his own blog, but I believe he will in a few days. If you want to pick his brain more, check his blog here.

Jason Acidre’s Advanced and Scalable Link Building

Ok if you do not know who is Jason Acidre by now, you probably haven’t been reading much. This guy is just is just great at what he does. This person is not just a talker, he shows you results. Actually my impression is he does not even talk that much. He just shows results which is even better. If you have no idea what I am saying, have a check for yourself and see the quality work Jason comes up with.

I foresee better quality SEO events in the Philippines moving forward! In the past I have also spoke almost year after year on various SEMCon, MORCon and Bataan Bootcamps in the past. Some of my previous presentations can be found here:

• Foundational Link Building
• Keyword Research
• SEO for Megasites

I understand how hard it can be to run a site and not really make any money out of it. And the larger the website, the audience, the members, the diskspace and bandwidth become, the larger the resources, problems, time required to maintain the site, politics and all other stuff, good or bad increases too. All of this contributes to a cost, even if it does not seam monetary, the fact that you have to maintain a server and dedicate some time is a cost. Running an active, non-profit forum is no easy task.

History of SEO Philippines

I am not sure if I am the best person to give this history, nor have I documented this accurately like how a historian would. But just based on pure memory of what I remember, back in 2004 I a web design/developer for a company that does websites of doctors, dentist and lawyers. And I was given SEO instruction on how I build the site. And this sparked my interest right away that I started applying this to some of my own clients in the Philippines. one of them was a marketing training company and during that time was ranking for a number of terms related to marketing and also the Philippines. But often mixed with the results was a certain Marc Macalua. His name kept popping up on some of the terms I was targeting for marketing. It was not something he was targeting but he was just simply talking about online marketing on his blog. And this is where I found out he was running a blog called SEO Philippines and had a YahooGroup under the same name that I immediately joined since I was excited to learn more and share more to others as well. Since the only best way to learn from others, it to teach them too. The more you share, the more others share to you.

The SEO Philippines YahooGroup

The YahooGroup just started to grow in size. Many of the original people on that group were not all people that were doing SEO for a living. 2004 was a young age for the Philippines in doing SEO but there were a few people that were really either web developers, web designers, writers, bloggers, affiliate marketers, etc. It was funny how many people had different names that it was hard to identify by email alone, but somehow I didn’t care if I didn’t know your name. As long as we all share information with each other, it’s all good to me. When the group increased in size until emails became somewhat annoying already because of the high frequency of emails coming in from the group, Marc decided to move this on to an online forum. During these days, it is hard to remember who the active members were. I still recall  web developers such as myself, Mike Lopez and Jason Torres were on the list. Forum owner Jedi Dancel, Veteran SEO Jonathan Casuncad, Blog personalities like Mike Abundo. Established SEO company owners in the Philippines like Mike Turner, Jonathan Bertrand and the main disturbance in the force, Mike Rogers and there were tons more.

Migration to SEO.ph & Isulong SEOph

As a natural progression, it was impossible to trace everything in YahooGroups, the forum was definitely better. During these initial months was also the time in 2006 when Marc held the first SEO.ph SEO contest. This was the Isulong SEOph. This is where I have seen and experienced how SEO really is against other SEOs in ranking. Where sometimes industriousness can beat strategy. And sometimes smart planning in strategy can also beat hard working industriousness. Either way, some people were more tired than others, and I always tried to look for the easy way out of work and find a way to win with less work. Looks like my ways then were not enough to beat these top 10 winners of the Isulong SEOph SEO contest. I was #11 in that contest and did not even win a consolation prize. But it was also in this contest where some of the new fresh talents started to emerge. Si Noel Bautista, Ely ‘Jozzua’ Apao, Zaldy Dalisay, Whin Clores, Gio Castro and more! The contest was a good learning experience, you did not have to win to make joining the contest worthwhile. As long as you learned something. contest were good.

Ituloy AngSulong SEO Contest

The second SEO contest by SEO Philippines, Ituloy AngSulong. I would say this was a successful contest also. New people started to emerge. And new link bait ideas and strategies came out too. How Jason Torres used design as link bait. How Gio Castro was still successful with his shadowing. Writer/Blogger Marhgil Macuha shows the power of content. Eligio Tapiador comes out of nowhere. Alfredo Palconit got over the blackhat drama of Isulong SEOph, there were tons of SEOs from Pangasinan! SEO cuties started appearing, Rhiza Sanchez, Ada Lajara. Online kid start making money online Alan Ocab started making waves. Rostum was only making $7k a month then. Zaldy Dalisay just kept winning some place in the contest even with a non-keyword focused domain. Robert Desacada had a life changing event and SEO has given him a new career. Dreamhost was disqualified in the contest! Yes that was one of the biggest SEO lessons I had. I started doing tool baits, theme baits, and all other sorts of baits. I guess if this contest organized by Marc did not happen, a lot of SEO lessons and friends I initially met in person would not have happened also.

Bayanihan Philippines, Politics, Conflicts, etc.

It’s funny how people complain at things even if they get a lot of things free. That’s how it was with Ituloy AngSulong but I am not going to go down into talking about that. Because I never paid attention to all the details. As long as I had fun doing what I needed to do, that is all I needed to know. A third SEO contest comes out… Bayanihan Philippines. The concept was good, the rules changed, but… due to unforeseen events, there were sponsor issues. If a sponsor backs out, what do you do? I guess this was a hard decision to make since cancelling the contest midway also meant some people were not paid. I guess this might have had a negative effect on the perception of the forum, or the perception of Marc in general also. But looking at all the effort he put into running the forum… I didn’t mind these mistakes.

As time pass by, SEO.ph was already a recognized group not only in the Philippines but also outside of the Philippines with Marc as the main man behind it. Many of the old members started developing careers in SEO. All were spending more time working, that everyone had less time managing the forum. I became of the moderators, one of the admins, and spammers would just come in left and right. It was a tough job.

Now since I am US-based, I do not know completely all the details of what happens behind the scene. I know there has been some movement trying to formalize the group. And different parties were trying to go in different directions. Everyone wanted their hand in there somewhere. I never really cared about that. All I did was continue to use the forum. Post, share and learn.

SEO.ph is gone

Now that Marc has announced he is stopping the forum, I must say the whole SEO.ph forum was a part of my growing in the SEO industry. And I think it is true also for other Filipino SEOs. So I would like to say thanks Marc for the effort you have exerted in running the group. It has influence several people and I believe it is a part of the Philippines’ SEO history.

Let’s Reboot Blogging

Well since my blogs have been stagnant, I guess it is time to revive the blogs. but of course, there is a lot to work on. I will use this blog post as my checklist of items to work on and will cross out each one as I finish each task and revive my blog.

• Upgrade WP and all Plugins Done: August 22, 2010.
• Remove all the Subdomains
  The  subdomains here were done for the wrong reasons. My site started mainly as an SEO Contest entry. The subdomain entry was like a throw everything to the wall and see what sticks. It was like optimize all 5 subdomains with different techniques and see who ranks the highest. Aside from that, subdomains were treated differently then, where they were more like separate websites and the links were weighed more because they were like external links and not internal links. After the contest, I planned on merging it all, but for some reason… each subdomain was making money in different ways, and the subdomains were register in various monetization programs that I couldn’t merge them yet, because the change in domain would cancel my membership in some of these programs. Well today… my sites are no longer earning in the same way, and now is a good time to merge these. I will do this mainly by WordPress import.
  • Update: August 22, 2010 – About.SEOReligion.com blog imported.
  • Update: August 23, 2010 – Downloads.SEOReligion.com blog imported.
• Merge SEOContest2008.com and other domains.
  It makes no sense to maintain several SEO blogs, SEOContest2008.com was mainly for a contest and today it really has no main purpose. Might as well import the post to this blog.
  • Update: August 22, 2010 – The domain ituloy-angsulong.info, now 301 redirects to seoreligion.com, it was an old domain this site used to use.
  • Udate: August 23, 2010 – Old SEO Contest entry domain, isulongseoph.com which once had a PR6, lots of link baitable content and was earning some decent amount of money from affiliate stuff just one day, was all erased on my web host for some mysterious reason and was all irretrievable. Merged them all to this blog.
• Fix 301 redirects
  Since I will be merging several subdomains and domains, to the main domain, looks like I will do some massive wildcard redirection. .htaccess and regex is not my specialty, so I will just use the same WP catch all .htaccess, create a custom index.php, and do a PHP 301 redirect, just changing the domain but retaining the $_SERVER[REQUEST_URI]  variable.
  • Update: August 22, 2010 – About.SEOReligion.com blog 301 redirecting already. Home goes to about category. Each blog post goes to corresponding permalink.
  • Update: August 23, 2010 – About.SEOReligion.com blog 301 redirecting. The homepage though goes to the tools category and will reconfigure this to the tools tag.
• Update Navigation
  • Update: August 22, 2010 – About navigational link updated.
• Update Categories/Tags/More Link
  • Update: August 22, 2010 – Updated for whole About section.
• Change the Theme
  This was a custom theme I made and was intended to attract people from the UK, to possible get more people from the UK link to my sites. And this was mainly for the SEO Contest by UK Webmaster World.
• Update Monetization Efforts
  • Ad publishing
    Add Adsense again.
  • Affiliate marketing
    Some of them no longer exist, I got to remove these and add new ones that make sense.
  • In-Text Ads
    I’m using Kontera, and I think there might be better programs out there I need to research on. Then I need to update them on here.

Time to get to work and hopefully get my blogs start earning again and possible more than what they used to earn.

If ever you do need a copy of this internal linking WP plugin by Jan Hvizdak, you can download my old working copy of the Cross Linker WordPress Plugin here. Although I still do suggest checking the official site from time to time, he might have the latest better version, but while the page is down, you can use this version if you want.

I know this is an SEO blog… and I should not take out my personal emotions here. But I can’t help it. Imagine this… I receive a card from someone. She knows I am married. Although I’ve know her since 2001 but we never had anything seriously romantic. I can say I’ve used her some times. And she has used me too. I can say we both had some nice times together.

She shows me a lot of p**n on the net sometimes, and I sometimes don’t like what she shows me so I tell her not to show me these stuff anymore and she strictly abides to my plea. She tells me she’s ready to go back to the “hot” mode anytime when I am ready. But right now she is set to strict settings.

Although I have interacted with her many times, and almost every day, can’t she see I am married? And then she sends me a Valentines card. She says she wants to overfill my heart! She wants to overload my… oh my… And not only that! She’s paying me $100! And from what I heard… she did not only send the card to me. I believe she sent the exact same card to several people also.

Well $100 is still $100, I took the money! *LOL* And I know you are hot but no one is replacing my wife. But I know we will always be friends. I love you as my friend. And…  that strict setting by the way… you can change that to moderate. You never know… after I see you in moderate settings, I might just turn all settings off!

Read her card below:

Google Adwords Keyword Traffic Estimator where you can see the language and country selection before the form.

Just in case you do not know yet, most of the search engines keyword research tool already give you the option to choose certain countries or cities of the work which will already help in International SEO.

Google Search Based Keyword Research Tool Country Selection Option

However sometimes in other countries, the predominant search engine is not always Google, Yahoo or Bing and tools offered by other engines can give you more better local insights into what people are really searching for within a target country.

I do not have a list of tools for every country in the world, but I do have a few tools that can be used in some countries for your International SEO efforts. Here are the list of tools below:

China/Chinese Keyword Research Tool

Baidu – The predominant search engine in China has it’s own keyword research tool. The link I have is going to their user manual and not really to the tool, since the tool is in Chinese which I really cannot read. But if you can, you should not find any difficulty joining their PPC network and checking out the keyword research tool they have in that section.

European Keyword Research Tools

Miva – They have a PPC network that their gets get to various popular websites including download.com / cnet.com so we can say their data is pretty significant. They have separate keyword research tools for UK, Germany, France and other European countries. Problem is often their keyword research tool is down. Although they do have an API available to members of their PPC network and advertising on their network may not be a bad idea. So if you visit the link and you go to this help page, click on the link going to the tool popup window and if it does not load, their public facing tool may be down again. The one I linked to was for UK and they have other URLs for the other European countries.

German Keyword Research Tool

Keyword Datenbank – The Germans are pretty good in SEO and they have their own SEO community that gives the good demand for coming up with German SEO Tools. One of these tools they have is the Keyword Datenbank which is for keywords in German.

Russian Keyword Research

Russia also has a large SEO community where they not only concentrate on learning SEO internationally, but they are of course experts in their own search engines like Yandex and Rambler. Their largest email platform is mail.ru and all these three including another company called Live Internet all offer keyword research tools for the Russian language. As of this current time, it seems Rambler’s keyword research too that used to be on: http://stat.go.mail.ru/ is currently down. Live Internet may require you to be a member of their site to access data.

• Yandex Keyword Statistics
• Rambler Search Query Request Stats
• Live Internet

Korean Keyword Research Tool

Naver Popular Keywords – Naver is the predominant search engine in Korea and it also has keyword-based advertising platform. The link here is the popular search queries on Naver.

Philippines Keyword Research Tool

Sulit.com.ph – The predominant search engine in the Philippines is still Google. There are other engines in the past that tried being a search engine but was easily overshadowed when Google came out. But one of the largest sites in the Philippines is a buy and sell/classified ads type of community forum where people post things they are selling and buyers search for any product under the sun that hopefully someone is selling. Many Filipinos use the site searching for online deals of any product or service in the Philippines and these top search queries are captured by their system and can help serve as a guide in keyword research also.

Other Country Keyword Research Tools

If you are targeting a country not in this list and you are from that country, most probably you know more than me. Here are a few tips in searching for a keyword research tool in your local country.

1. If Google, Yahoo and Bing are not the predominant search engines then check your local search engine if they have a keyword research tool They would usually have one if they have keyword based advertising which is how most search engines make money.
2. If Yahoo or Bing are used more than Google in your country, might as well prioritize using their keyword research tools instead of Google’s.
3. If there is a website that is used often for buying products or searching for services, something like an Amazon or eBay that is widely used in your country, check if they have a keyword research tool If they don’t, then check if they have a bestseller list, often the bestsellers are also the ones that are searched the most. And this may give you more inspiration in coming up with more keywords to target.

Ok, of course that is a stupid way to hide text. And of course Matt Cutts will say do not hide the text. But I will tell you a secret!

How to hide text that the Google Spam Team will NEVER find out!

You think Matt Cutts is the smartest guy in the world? I am a professional blackhat and I know the perfect way that Matt Cutts will never be able to see my hidden text eveeerrr!!!

Ok, promise not to tell anyone this procedure. I do not know how long I will keep this up online, and you are probably the selected few that will be able to read this completely…

Once you read this, I suggest stay low and don’t promote this that much. I know many of you may have been reading about user agent detection, conditional IP redirection, forward and backward DNS checking of Googlebot, but all of those are not effective. Some from Google can still find out about those.

So here the is perfect way to hide text. Feel free to print this page for future reference. There are several steps but they are not hard. Just follow the steps to the letter.

1. Highlight the text you want to hide in the HTML source code of your webpage.
2. Hit Ctrl-X and this will cut the text and place it in your computer’s imaginary clipboard.
3. Open your favorite text editor like MS Word, or any kind. This is platform independent by the way. You can do this on a Mac or a Linux machine.
4. Hit Ctrl-V while in your favorite text editor. This will paste the hidden text you have in the clipboard. Getting better huh? It’s really hidden that I doubt Matt can see this.
5. Saving this file is optional, you can do File –> Save or just hit Ctrl-S but saving it leaves traces of the file. It might not be that hidden. I highly recommend do not save it. This is important! Remember this step please.
6. Next is press Ctrl-P and this brings up the Print dialog box. You will see a Print or OK button. Before clicking on that, make sure you have the correct print that is ready/online and the printer has paper loaded before you click the button. If everything is all ready, print the document.
7. Once the document is printed, fold it in half crosswise, then fold it in half again. This is a recursive process. Here is the code you could use:
   while ($canStillFold == 1) {
foldPaper(crosswise);
}
8. Place the folder paper in a zip-lock bag. To even be more secure, try using a Tamper Indicating Blue-Adhesive Security Bag or a secure deposit bag. Seal the bag.
9. With a shovel, dig a hole in the ground. The diameter can be the diameter of the shovel. So a small shovel would be more ideal. The larger the hole you make on the ground, the more footprint security trails you will leave that Googlebot might be able to crawl. A 10″ diameter hole in the ground should be good enough. And make this hole about 3 feet deep. This way, it is deep enough that dogs won’t dig in the hole and dogs are sometimes crawled by Googlebot.
10. Put the sealed bag with the hidden content in the hole, and cover it again with the soil you dug out. Compact the soil well by jumping over it. Then water over it, for the mud to harden. Give is a day to dry up.
11. On the next day, take a look at the covered dug area and try to check for anything unusual. If it looks fishy, someone might submit it to the Google Spam Report page. We don’t want that to happen. Use the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar and disable JavaScript, CSS, Images and see how it looks like. If the area looks too clean, make it a bit dirty to match the surroundings. No one will see it unless they do a Ctrl-A. Put some twigs on there, some fallen leaves, grass, whatever. One of my favorites is dog poop, it drives away people. If you do not have a dog, you can buy dog poop as gifts and use it to cover the dug site.

Task complete! This hidden content is so hidden that even you might forget about it. So take note of the proximity of the hidden text with other objects in it’s surroundings, remember it well with an estimated distance so when you need the text, you know where to dig. If it is over a large area that looks all the same, you can use online maps. I suggest try using Bing Maps because if you use Google Maps, that is like feeding yourself to the lions. Even if you place your hidden text on the moon or on Mars, Google Maps can find you.

Save this now and print it. Because I do not know how long I will keep this secret in a public blog post. This is a special offer that in the next day or two I will put this down unless you want to receive the special printout of this exact blog post mailed to you in a secure ziplock bag printed on plain bond paper. If you want a copy, just send me $20 bucks and I will mail this to you and you can hide this content also in a hole in the ground. To order, simply use the buy now button. Shipping is free and this product is no return, no exchange.

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