1. Web developers do not deliver a good job (I have tell you n times about everything you need to know, including inserting auto-play background music. I have also given you guys a benchmark website which I want – I want it to be similiar or better than Dell’s online ordering website. I have budget, yes I have!)

2. My site ranking is poor, something is wrong (Why other websites are listed on the the first page of Google but not mine. I should engage my friend who is a SEO expert working in eOneShreak)

3. Isn’t my website should be fully automated (What I want to say is, web developer should create an auto-pilot website or money making machine version 2.0. I just need to sit there waiting for money to come in)

4. Keep my online business ideas confidential (My ideas is first in the universe. I have discussed this plan with God and both of us agreed that this will hit and overtake Facebook. You are lucky to be involved in project like this)

5. The site is not what I want… (Isn’t that you know everything about website? You should propose something fresh, innovative, better, faster….)

Web developer says:

1. Well, we are afraid that this is what we can do with your limited budget (Even given the same budget as what Dell has invested, you are only a copycat and your business will fail because a website is not an online business. You need to have strategy to make it work and remarkable)

2. There is no overnight trick to make your page to first in Google (Idiot, do you know what is PR? Not Public Relations but Page Rank)

3. We have done all the integration right (If we are able to come out with such thing, we would not be here doing the website for you. You know, you don’t even buy anything online before and you expect your online business to be built and money piling up in your Paypal account. Again, do you have Paypal?)

4. Sure! We will keep this ideas to no one including my cat. My fish do not talk but I won’t tell them too (This is the n times of people mentioning this ideas. To make you happy and to make sure we get the project, we will agree that you have done all the search in Google and happily confirmed that you find no similar website or ideas)

5. Let’s us try again and we hope it is closer to what you want this time (We have another final payment to collect so we will have to bear with you a wee longer. We do not understand what do you mean by better, give us clear guideline)

Well, it’s not possible to “delete” those pages from Google (unless you get a court injunction ordering Google to do so). But he can add in more positive content about the person, and try to boost these web pages up the ranking using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

But if an individual, a business or an organization’s reputation is already bad due to their behavior, no matter how much positive content is generated, even more negative content can still get its way into the search pages. This is especially so when everyone can publish nowadays on the Internet by means of blogging.

With the advent of Internet, and social media more recently, reputation management has become very important for individuals, businesses and organizations in their branding, marketing and PR efforts.

Perhaps the best policy is do like what Google says, “Don’t be evil”. Be good and people will talk about us well on the Internet.

But in case there is any negative content, one can contact the web site owner, or participate in its forum or blog, and try to set things right, perhaps by posting feedback or comments on the web sites. Be professional and don’t hide behind anonymous email address which I believe some commentators did on this blog when I talked about them. Be respectful. Don’t point fingers and don’t lose temper.

Today we no longer can ignore what people say about us on the Internet. The long term solution is to be good and not evil. As for my customer, all the best to him for what he intends to do.

Search engine friendliness – A normal web site is “static”, meaning that it doesn’t change much over time. But a blog updated regularly can provide fresh content to the search engines. Google can crawl your web site and so update its search results more often if it has a blog.

Keywording – What keywords you want people to type in Google to find you? In blog you can stuff your blog posts with the keywords you want. A blog is ever-growing and so your keywords’ exposure grows as well.

Ease of setup – You may need a web designer to do up your web site. But with blog, there are so many free blogging software available, such as WordPress, that you don’t really need so much technical knowledge to create a blog site. DIY stands for Do It Yourself!

Ease of maintenance – With a normal web site, you may need to spend much for a web designer to update your content (maintenance is not cheap so that’s why you can see so many web sites not updated). But with a blog, you can just login any time to make changes yourself! Again, it’s free!

Low cost – You may need to spend thousands of dollars to hire a web design firm. But with blogging, web development can be literally FREE! At most, you need to pay up for your domain name, web hosting, and maybe hire someone to set up your blog. Then you are off to blogging!

So if you already have a conventional web site, I guess it’s time to add a blog to it. If you don’t have a web site yet, why not create your whole site as a blog?

Not convinced?  Find out more from OneCoach – the 3 ways how blogging can help your business.

Google search result was then very much based on PageRank to calculate the “popularity” of web sites.  One main factor for the “popularity” of a web site is the number and quality of links from other web sites to it.  The more backlinks your web site has, the more “popular” it is, and so the higher ranking you will get in Google.

So how to outsmart Google?  We thought of the possibility of ranking web sites based on their traffic.  The more a web site is visited, the higher ranking it should have.  We thought of calculating “popularity” based on hits, not backlinks.

But how are we going to track the traffic?  We can’t get site owners to put a counter code on their sites.  We also can’t access their web server logs.  So finally we did nothing and dropped the idea.

But now Microsoft seems to be on similar line of thought when they proposed something called BrowseRank, which calculates popularity based on traffic and usage.  The more a web site is visited and the longer period of time it is spent on by users, the higher ranking it should have in search result.

I don’t know how they could do it.  But if they succeed to beat Google and become the number one search engine (which I think is not likely), I and my friend have only ourselves to blame for not further developing our idea.

I heard there are three kinds of people in this world – those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who don’t know what happen!  Apparently I belong to those who watch things happen!

According to common understanding (or misunderstanding?), when you link out to another web page, you are giving them a “vote” on its importance.  Google will treat your link to the page as a backlink, therefore ranking that page higher in its search result pages.

Furthermore, when you link out to another page, according to the common (mis)understanding of the Google PageRank formula, you can be losing “importance” for yourself, and so your link love makes you less important, and so lower ranking in Google search result.

This is not to mention that, when you link out to another page, you can drive visitors away from your web site to those page, therefore reducing traffic on your web site.

Therefore, many site owners or bloggers are very careful in linking to others.  Reciprocal linking (both pages agree to link to each other)?  Maybe.  One way linking?  By default no!

But have we understood it correctly?  After reading directly from the source in the official Google webmaster central blog, it seems that it really does not matter whether we should be generous or stingy in our link love or not.

What really matters is that we link to only web pages whose content are relevant to ours.  This can make our site even more “important” in our subject matter.  But we need to avoid linking to web pages with irrelevant content, “spammy” pages which exist only to increase their search ranking, and “bad neighborhood” which is a collection of web sites which scheme to increase ranking of one another.

By the way, I wonder if “link love” is an appropriate term or not.  True love to someone, as I was taught, is something we give out unselfishly, even if the other person does not deserve it.  It is a mercy and grace.  It is not about what we can get in return.

So are you a generous link lover or a stingy link lover?  As for me, I’m learning to be generous one.  I will link to you if you are good and relevant, whether you ask for it or not.  And as a site owner, my job is not to beg for links, but to develop really good content so that others will “love” me more

But obviously I have been left behind after so many years, that now you can no longer find me when you type the phrase above in Google. Yes, the competition has caught up. But to my fault, I have remained stagnant and didn’t keep up with the changes

Anyway, now I consider myself a newbie “reborn” on the Internet and will try to catch up as much as I can. Found this blog post from E-Myth, a very good introduction to search engine optimization (SEO) for web sites.

It introduces you how search engines work (you need to understand them to be able to optimize your sites for them), and what you can do to increase your chance of being ranked highly on search engine result pages.

It’s basic yet very important. Lots of web sites still fail to heed the advice. So check it out!

PS: By the way, I no longer position myself as an “Internet marketing expert”, simply because I am not. Even if I am one day, why should I tell the world?  I can use the skills only for my businesses, and projects which I really have a heart for, including some non-profit and community projects I already have in mind…

Anyway, I was asked how to rank their web site higher in search engines.  These three areas below are what was shared:

Targeted keywords – Determine first what keywords you want your customers to search on to find you.  Expand your list of potential keywords to include all possibilities.  Use a keywording tool to find out the popularity and competitiveness of these keywords.  Then choose your keywords depending on your targeted positioning in the market.

Search engine friendly web site – Develop your web site in a way that is search engine friendly, one which can be easily included by Google and other search engines.  For example, your web site should not make excessive use of Flash, graphics, animations and frames.  Add meta tags like the important page title tags.  The use of Google Sitemap is also recommended.

Content is still the king – Don’t try to cheat Google with fancy tactics.  Their engineers are much more sophisticated than us and we can get banned doing that.  Instead, work on developing excellent content around your selected keywords.  Even create articles and resources so interesting that other sites want to link to you voluntarily.  The more incoming links you have, the better off you are.  This is link-baiting.

These tips are by no means exhaustive.  How do you position yours in search engines?  Do correct me or add in your own opinion.