SEO Dance

My time blogging for SEO Dance is coming to an end. I just have too much on my plate to really give this blog the attention it deserves. I have learned a lot because of blogging at SEO Dance, and it’s been a great experience. Lately I just haven’t had the time to really dig into search engine techniques and news. So, I’ve decided to step down to give someone else a chance. Maybe a new blogger will take over the site soon.

I will still write for 451 Press at Wiirally.com and Msstate-college.com. Come by and visit when you can.

As a part of our blog network promotion, 451press bigwigs came up with a comment contest for non-451press bloggers who read our blogs. Yes, it’s for you our dear visitors.

If you’ve been a lurker on my blog it’s your chance to win $500.

451press will award six prizes to the six randomly chosen comments from this month. There will be one (1) $500 cash prize and five (5) $100 cash prizes. We will contact the winning commenters using the email address they enter with the comment. Comments made through January 31st will be entered in the contest and the winners will be announced on February 1st.

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What invaluable SEO lessons have you learned this year?

After all those SEO tricks I’ve witnessed work on my sites, this SEO blog remains to be the hardest to make it reach the top of Google.

So, yes, you guessed it right, I’m still aiming for this blog to get a good Google placement. SOON!

And will be working on my other neglected blogs, too.

Search Engine Strategies is a grand search engine marketing and optimization event organized by Danny Sullivan. It will be held in Hilton Chicago on December 4-7.

SES Chicago 2006 will be tackling the following topics:

- How search engines list Web sites for free and through paid placements;
- How to get free “organic” traffic by building a site that pleases search engines and your visitors;

- How to efficiently purchase listings guaranteed to rank your company at the top of search engine results;

- How to calculate the ROI of your SEM and SEO efforts by tracking your visitors from the time they hit your site until they buy, and get tips on improving conversion if they don’t;

- How to build links that generate traffic to your Web site, and how to avoid the penalties of “spamming” the search engines;

- What’s coming next in the constantly evolving world of Web search, and how you can profit from these changes.

Here the profiles of the SES 2006 Exhibitors.

SES Chicago 2006, search engine strategies, Danny Sullivan

Update: On December 22, it’s Globe Orgasm Day, but today December 1, it’s World AIDS Day. This is the 19th World AIDS Day, the 25th year since the first case of AIDS was identified.

It would be more timely to think of all the victims of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) and pray to avoid its spread.

Many think that AIDS is just Africa’s problem. But recent report stated that the HIV/AIDS cases in Shanghai have raised to 70%.

However, as cliche’ as it may sound, one should not be just hoping not to get AIDS. Learn about AIDS! Knowledge is one’s best defense.

If you’d like to take part in providing AIDS awareness, this World AIDS Day RED Campaign, which was co-founded by U2’s Bono. Among this initiative’s partners is Motorola that offers RED Motorazr and RED Motoslvr; and Apple, which offers iPod Nano RED. Proceeds from these special edition products will go to Global Fund.

via PretoriaNews and Official Google Blog

If you’ve been visiting this blog for quite some time, you’ll notice that since yesterday its layout has been re-designed.

Round edges and 451 Press flame logo’s soul subtly sitting regal at the background of the list of 451 blogs - so Web 2.0 a blog layout don’t you think?

It would be nice if each of our blogs have a different header design. But that would soon be resolved, I’m sure.

I’m liking its overall impact. Thanks Chrispian, Shickles, and Kim.

But what can you say about this new layout?

451press, blog layout, Wordpress theme, new layout, Web 2.0

Idea Catchers, a web design and online marketing support company is sponsoring the “Ugly E-commerce Site Makeover Contest” for online store owners, independent retailers, and catalog or mail-order companies with an e-commerce site.

The prize is a custom e-commerce site worth $25,000 and 90 days of online marketing support (probably search engine optimization and positioning, link placements, press releases, blogs, pay-per-click campaigns, email newsletters).

The deadline in submitting entries is on December 31, 2006.

Here are the contest guidelines and where you can enter your site to the Ugly E-commerce Contest.

e-commerce site makeover, website makeover, makeover contest, online marketing, Idea Catchers, ugly e-commerce contest

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary is one of the widely-used method of keeping up-to-date with industrial news from blogs or sites and a method for bloggers or webmasters to keep its readers stapled or to generate repeat traffic. If you don’t have an RSS feed to offer to your readers yet, you’re losing the chance of making your accidental on non-accidental readers go back to your site or blog when you update it.

However, since not a lot of people are as giddy on adding new RSS feeds from blogs they visit everyday, no matter how good the content those blogs offer, one has to come up with some way to perpetually increase his blog’s RSS subscribers.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim is one of those bloggers that know how to up his readership. He has just announced today that he is giving away a free iPod to one of his blog’s RSS subscribers just by subscribing and here are the mechanics of this contest.

I’m wondering, when can I afford to host a traffic-generation contest like that?

ipod shuffle, ipod contest, free ipod, RSS, RSS contest, marketing pilgrim, traffic tip

I’ve been veering away from blogging about this one helluvan SEO Rockstar meet-and-greet because I can’t go. Well no it’s not just a meet-and-greet type of event, it’s PubCon. But yeah, many SEO people, esp. the non-Rockstar levels would definitely love that part of this everything search engine event.

The PubCon will be held in Las Vegas Convention Center on November 14-17, 2006.

The topics that will be tackled include Search, Net Marketing, SEO/SEM, Affiliates, General Webmastery.

Who are the keynote speakers attending for SEO’s to drool on?

Sigh.

SEO conference, PubCon Las Vegas, PubCon 2006, SEO Rockstars

John Stephen Anderson, Jr. from ClipClip started sending me emails suggesting that I try URL, a 3 in 1 search engine that shows the SERP’s of the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

According to John, URL.com is a collaborative search engine that has a chance of becoming a REALLY influential search engine, where you can “search with many” and “never search alone”.

Queried a bit on how are things going with URL.com’s Beta campaign and voila:

What company is URL.com under?

JSA: Right now we’re calling the “parent company” CoolChaser – though we’re not yet fully formed yet.

What services does URL.com offer? What is its uniqueness or benefits that other search engines do not offer?

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Ituloy AngSulong is the keyphrase all SEO experts and beginners should work on to make their sites get the top of the 3 major SE’s search engine results page.

This will be the second SEO contest that the SEOPhillppines e-group has organized. The first SEO contest which gave out prizes as much as USD2,600 was for the keywords Isulong SEOPH. Isulong SEOPH is a Tagalog phrase meaning to advance SEOPH (short for SEO Philippines). The first contest resulted to horrendous comment spamming which is what the 2nd contest will avoid with the help of new rules. Uh-oh!

Now the keywords are Ituloy AngSulong, which means “continue to advance.” Quite clever, eh? I have checked the SERPs of Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the 3 search engines the Ituloy AngSulong SEO contest participants will be optimizing for and found no results for Yahoo and Google yet. But, MSN yielded 2 results (one’s indented) for this early bird of an SEO guy. Whin of BicolBusinessDirectory who actually won the 2nd prize for the first SEO contest in the Philippines.

That and see the first screenshot that showed the Ituloy AngSulong domain name already grabbed? Considering that the contest has just been announced yesterday, I bet all the Ituloy AngSulong domain names were already grabbed. SEO experts in the Philippines are this excited! Haha. But no, it’s actually one good SEO tactic to start early, right?

Oh by the way, the SEO contest organizer Mr. Marc Macalua is still looking for more sponsors to make this contest merrier. If you’d like your website to gain quality link building from this contest, join the fun or be a sponsor.

Will be posting more details of this Ituloy AngSulong SEO Contest soon.

Via The J Spot

ituloy angsulong, SEO contest, Isulong SEOPH, link building, comment spamming, SEO Philippines

SEO experts and noobs alike can benefit from this new SEO tool, Search Status which is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla. Of course, Mozilla or Mozilla Firefox browser is required to be able to run SearchStatus.

Search Status can deliver the following search-related benefits to search engine optimizers:

- View any website’s Google PageRank
- View any website’s Category
- View any website’s Alexa Popularity Ranking
- View any website’s Alexa Incoming Links
- View any website’s Alexa Related Links and
- View any website’s Backlinks from Google, Yahoo, and MSN

More details and download Search Status via Quirk

searchstatus, search status, seo tool, firefox, mozilla, firefox plugin, backlink, Alexa ranking

(image from mcla.edu)

What more fun way to get the ball rolling in this blog than to start with an SEO experiment, right? I gave the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) a good rummage down to the fifth SERP (Search Engine Results Page) at least, but could not find my blog for the keywords of its domain name. Simply put, SEO Dance, when searched does not lead to my blog, “yet.”

This prompted me to discuss this SEO experiment I’ll be performing for my SEO Dance blog. If I want more traffic to my blog, of course, I need to get my blog found. So, yeah, the objective of this SEO experiment is to make http://www.seodance.com/ jump that long queue of SEO Dance wannabes and get to the top of SERPs.

If I want that to happen, I will surely be needing some really powerful SEO techniques, right? Yes, the adjective powerful just have to be there because while checking the competition for my keywords “seo dance”, here are the disheartening number of search results from each of the search engines:

Google has 8,520,000 search results for SEO Dance
Yahoo has 2,300,000 search results for SEO Dance
MSN has 246,052 search results for SEO Dance

With those millions of results to overtake, you think only prayers and bribing the search engine engineers will make my blog stand out and reach that coveted first page of the SERPs. But no, I prefer to take the challenge and do it the white hat way and I don’t have some moolah to shell out for the bribing part anyways. Oh, if you haven’t heard yet about this SEO technique dichotomy white hat and black hat, I’ll be blabbing more about it in the next posts to come.

Do check out this blog again if you want to know about the list of SEO techniques I will use for this SEO experiment. Also, I wish that you join me and do try to perform this SEO experiment on your own blog. It’s one cool and educational way to drive traffic to our blogs. Cheers!

SEO experiment, SEO technique, white hat, black hat, blog traffic, SERP

Who would have thought I’ll be blogging about Search Engine Optimization in the near future? What? You don’t know what SEO is? SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the million mojos that enable Larry Page and Sergey Brin afford to buy YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Seriously, SEO or Search Engine Optimization is all about flirting with the search engines, especially the big ones MSN, Yahoo!, and of course, Dogpile, Google.

Why would you want to flirt with search engines? You want to be found. You don’t want to get lost in the middle of millions of search results. Searchability is the goal of many SEO’s (Search Engine Optimization professionals). But it’s not plain Jane searchability SEOs aim for. It’s high searchability. It’s getting found EASILY. How’s that accomplished?

Do the SEO Dance!

If you have been longing to get your site get that search engine visibility, searchability, sorry, but I won’t tell you how to get your website’s a$s up over the hilt of Search Engine Results Page (SERP).  But I can lead you to resources that can help you with that. Is that OK with you?

Oh by the way, I’m Alfa Mercado. I run a home business managing a team of SEO copywriters. I’ve been in the blogging scene since time immemorial and Search Engine Optimization has been playing in my mind, especially when I joined one local SEO Contest and lost backed out.

I believe this blog will be undergoing some layout change soon. Our mother blog network 451 Press is currently holding a Wordpress Theme contest. Care to join? $2,000 is at stake!

Wordpress theme contest, SEO contest, SEO, search engine