It’s freezing cold there & I didn’t get much time writing here.

Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, is used almost by everyone I met there. Google is only used by some expats & foreigners.

I’ve thought about investing in Baidu but decided against it. I did, however, do a bit of research into how websites can optimize their pages for Baidu. I’ll post some more info here when I do some more research into it.

I did hear about Microsoft’s hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! but didn’t hear much about it onwards. If someone can shead some light on whether there’s been activity since, please post a comment here.

I bought off seo-sydney.net.au not too long ago (all the other better domain names were taken!) which I’m just aging for Google. Instead of parking the domain, I thought, heck, why not put something there. If you go through all the results for “seo sydney” in Google, you’ll see that it’s pretty saturated. There’s a lot of competition & any new contestants will just have to be patient. A year or so plus work plus money will just about do the job, I’d say.

Okay, now I’ve received a lot of emails on the topic of obtaining a job as an SEO in Sydney. I thought I mentioned this in a previous post but I’ll say it again. For those of you that are overseas & you’re thinking about getting into this industry, be warned, it’s nowhere near as lucrative as it used to be as there are plenty of SEOs to go around. That said, there’s still a demand for the right person with the right experience as with any job. Head to mycareer.com.au to find them.

How lucrative was the SEO trade? About $200,000 a year. A friend of mine here did $500/page optimized for a company (listed) that wanted over 100 pages optimized. I doubt you can still earn that much now.

I think salaries are at around $60,000-$100,000 on average a year now depending on experience. I stand to be corrected on this. I personally prefer to do freelance & it seems quite a few in this industry have the same preference.

Some of the largest companies in Australia could easily have their brand name taken advantage of on the web. Sometimes, there are large corporations that haven’t registered their brand name in other countries they market in.

Apparently, someone registered the name LouisVuitton(.cn or .com.cn) in China & sold fake LV items himself on the web. It did well until LV got on to them.
I don’t know if this story’s accurate at all because there’s a whole lot of BS on the Chinese web.

Regardless, it’s always important to register your brand in your country as well as any other ones you can register at.

I think quite a lot of Australia’s largest companies aren’t taking advantage of their reputation on the web.

It’s become a cliche to say that the web has changed the way businesses operate but many executives don’t fully comprehend the way it’s changed companies’ relation to clients. It’s ashame, but it represents opportunity.

For you SEOs reading this, the good news is that many companies are picking up on this and are hiring. It’s no longer viewed so much as a ‘black art’ as the field’s becoming more saturated but pay at the moment is still quite good. Some companies are dooing their SEO work inhouse. There are also some SEO jobs for consulting industry. View the OzJobsGuide.com.au (one of my 2 minute sites) for major job boards.

Back to what I was talking about before. Let’s do a case study. If you go to Google.com.au, type “financial advisor”, you’ll get this: result

What do you think of the results?

Internet is very rapidly converting into a world of e-business. In such an atmosphere of competition you immediate demand can be the best search engine optimization for which you should first think of web development. Among next few step one can be email marketing. If you want to learn more net marketing you can shift to internet marketing guide. Websites are recognized by their seo rankings.

For a search term where there are over 6 million results, I’ve already obtained first place spot on Yahoo! (& 4th on MSN) for a client I was working on the last 2 weeks.

Just so you know, the backlinks are all good & of fairly decent quality. There’s also another trick I used which I won’t reveal for now. Unfortunately, Google’s still at number 11 as the website’s still fairly new (Google likes older, trusted sites) & it’ll take a while before the backlinks “kick in” to effect. Regardless, I’m confident that we’ll get Google in a couple of months.

The client was very pleased about the Yahoo! success.

Companies offering internet phones have now cheaper rates for callers. Many companies like vonage through their voip software render free service of internet call within system. Best solutions for internet callers are being provide by voip com. Conventional telephone is being replaced with internet telephone service now.

You can find expiring domains as well with this tool.

View top picks or use the filters to search for DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory listed domains.

Others Tool

DropScout — high PageRank domains.

When you are in search of web host you can go online and click for web host search. Search engines like yahoo are well equipped with yahoo hosting. Web hosting companies like ipowerweb and startlogic are good companies for this purpose. When you think to find web host you should opt to design and host your site. You can look for a cheap hosting site to assess your challenges.

Static pages are your best bet if you’re optimizing for any/all of the major search engines.

On the grad jobs website, the accounting jobs category page would be http://graduatejobsnet.com.au/index.php?id=4123 or some other random number the search engine wouldn’t get much meaning from just by looking at the URL.

After making it a static page, it now reads: http://graduatejobsnet.com.au/category/accountingjobs.html

Looks better already, doesn’t it?

So how do you get started on converting your dynamic pages? You can get started by searching the mod_rewrite function or take a look here.

Templates make your life easy when you are writing something and you need to copy something best though and written. Same is the case with web templates. When you design your cv for job, cv template works wonder for you. Your own website needs flash templates. You can look online web template examples. Some websites offer web template guide.

I mentioned on a previous post how Google values .edu more for being “trusted”..

It appears that a commercial website has taken hold of a .edu domain to sell ringtones!

Google appears to have picked up on the spam though

Surfers and searchers sitting all time at their computers love to have internet phone service. Many online companies provide voip phone and vonage is one of them. People online from different parts of world can conduct voip conference. Online queries through internet voip enhance your business.

- DigitalPoint is a popular forum for webmasters.
- Textlink & linkadage are commercial venues to buy & sell links

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You’ll often notice that .edu sites have pretty good PR because they’re seen to be “more trusted” with Google.

Alison offers a blog at her .edu for $35 a month or $320 a year.

Not recommended.

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The ones that you generally can’t go wrong with is:

DMOZ - Free. Lists sites and relevant useful deep content. Listing may take a long time. Difficult to get listed in.
Yahoo! Directory - Pretty much all of my (commercial) websites are listed here. U.S. $299 review fee ($600 for adult) annual. If you’re lucky enough, some of the regional directories may even be free. Not the case in Australia though.
BOTW - Another site I use often for most of my websites. $69 recurring fee or $99 one-time. There’s also a sponsors program which lets you list text links in high category levels.

These are listed in the order I go through each time with a new site/client. DMOZ does have the option of allowing you to apply to become an editor. If you say you want to be an editor for SEO-related reasons, you won’t get accepted. If you say, however, that you want to help the web or something along those lines, it would help your application.

This is interesting given that Matt Cutts hates paid links

As long as we’re talking about links, this seems like a pretty good
opportunity to talk about a simple litmus test for paid links and how
to tell if a paid link violates search engines’ quality guidelines. If
you want to sell a link, you should at least provide machine-readable
disclosure for paid links by making your link in a way that doesn’t
affect search engines. … I wanted to give a heads-up because Google
is going to be looking at paid links more closely in the future.

Further, on Google’s Checkout, they’re profiling their own clients on their PR8 site. Here’s the quote:

In addition, Google Checkout helps make it even easier for consumers to find us when they search for items like Titleist Pro V1 Golf Balls by displaying the Google Checkout badge next to our search results.

I’m sure Titleist would be pleased with that! That’s got to be worth well over $1,000 in value!

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