Hello Again Everybody

I know it has been awhile since we last made an entry in our blog, but things have been kind of crazy at our mother company the SEO Services Thailand gang has been hard at work putting out high quality sites.

With that said let us introduce to you our lastest and greatest site Mogok Rubies

Mogok Rubies is a small specialized company owned by highly qualified jewellers from Europe and Myanmar. They only sell rubies, as nature made them over millions of years. None are heat treated, enhanced by radiation or chemical methods. In addition all our rubies are from Mogok, Myanmar only.

These precious stones are rare and the demand for them is huge. Especially untreated rubies. Untreated rubies are regarded as extremely rare gemstones, especially in the finer untreated Mogok qualities. It is a fact that untreated gem quality rubies can be more expensive than comparable sized diamonds. The combination of scarcity of the ruby, its supreme hardness and intriguing color has therefore always made an untreated ruby a most cherished gemstone and an attractive investment.

So now that we have your attention why dont you go vist this great site where you will find a wealth of information on Mogok Rubies

Archie Glikakis
SEO Consultant
Position Front Page

SEO Good News Bad News

Week two is history and and all goes well in the SEO world, for our two clients. Company Vauban is now ranking on MSN in position number One to boot! A few minor changes to the sites content and keyword frequency ensured us that ranking. Good job to my partner for that one.

Not to be outdone, my team also made some minor modifications then resubmitted our client's site and presto Indigo Consulting Group is also number one on MSN!

Coincidence? Absolutely not. We at Position Front Page know what we are doing. Or at least we like to think we do. See we never use any tricks or employ methods that would hurt our clients rankings in any way. We are dedicated to making them successful. We have a proven method that we are constently updating to meet the growing requirements of the major Search Engines. These results come as no surprise for us.

Thus far this friendly competition scores as follows:

Company Vauban using their primary keyphrase ranks #01 on MSN, Entireweb and a few note worthy others.

Indigo Consulting Group Ranks Number One on Yahoo and MSN for their primary Keyphrase as well as holding top 20 positions on EntireWeb and note worthy others.

So I guess I'm the winner thus far, but it is not over by any means. Next is the formidable Google. The true test for any SEO firm is getting ranked there.

We will keep you up to date with our changes and try to show you just how hard we work for our clients.

Archie Glikakis
Position Front Page

It has been an interesting 1st week. Both of our SEO teams here at Position Front Page got off to a fast start. A few tweaks here and there with the home pages and off they were waiting to get crawled.

Several pain staking hours after the start of the competition, both teams were busy submitting their respective sites to the various search engines.

Manual submission is a very important step, so are site maps. Submitting site maps to the various search ensures that they do indeed find all your pages.

The team assigned with the real estate Thailand Company Vauban, had their work cut out for them, only because the site has over 300 pages!

While my team working on the human resource consulting Thailand project, Indigo Consulting Group, had a lot less work.

The cutoff date for week one was established to be March 30th. And the results surprised all.

Indigo Consulting Group got picked up by Yahoo and ranked 2nd on the SERP for the keyphrase human resource consultants Thailand, but it didn't stay there long. Two days later much to everyones surprise it just vanished!

That's too bad as it would have meant that my team would have won the race to Yahoo but at the same time it was too good to be true. But does not explain why it happened. So we are all at a loss right now.

This week both teams will go back to tweaking and start link building. The results for week two may prove very interesting. So stay tuned. All of the first week resullts will be made available on our site later this week. Follow along and see how and who gets ranked first.

Archie Glikakis
Position Front Page

Here is something never seen before on the net. The SEO experts here at Position Front Page are conducting and online experiment. They recently completed two brand new websites with two completely different subject matters. One is a Real Estate Agency based in Thailand, the other a Human Resource Consulting firm also based in Thailand.

The Project which site will be the first to be ranked on Google, Yahoo and MSN, in the top thirty? I will be overlooking both project and will keep readers informed on their progress and you, our dedicated readers can also follow along by running queries once a week.

The First Player:
Company Vauban using the keywords, real estate Thailand, property for sale Thailand, real estate agency Thailand, Will be controlled by Paramita Artiwat, a SEO Consultant at our firm, and her team.

The Second Player:
Indigo Consulting Group using the Keywords, human resource consultants Thailand, human resource consulting Thailand, human resource management Thailand, will be handled by yours truely.

The Objectives:

This isn't a test of who is better at SEO but rather at test of how the Search Engines respond to new sites. Are there sites that are more easily ranked than others? Does our formula for getting sites ranked work the same way for all categories? Are the new Algorithms working as they should?

Display Results for all to see!

Here is what we know thus far. It will most likely take around six months to accomplish this feat. Both experts will use our in-house formula for getting sites ranked. Both sites have been designed in the same way but one does generate dynamic pages. One site has over 400 pages while the other has around 20. Will that count for anything? We will soon find out.

To balance the scales we have used the same keyword and link frequency on both sites and we are only concerned with the home page. As time goes by we will add pages to be indexed and perform the required changes. Commentary will be supplied by me through this forum, so stay tuned and we will also be featuring the results on a week to week basis on our sister site's Blog located at Position First Page Blog.

So all I can say is stay tuned with us the professional SEO guys,who know exactly what it takes to make a site look great, load fast, and get indexed. Trust the Professionals Position Front Page Suppling SEO Services to clients in Thailand.

Archie Glikakis
Position Front Page

Dynamically Created Pages Can They Be Indexed?

Dynamically created web pages often cause problems with search engines. If your web pages are dynamically created, it's likely that many search engines may have difficulty indexing them.

Until now! Hello everyone. Yes its me again and I know it has been a while since my last letter but things have been a little hectic around here. But I'm back to address this most crucial issue.

Dynamiclly created pages are awesome, simply because of how fast they load and mainly because no one has to create them. They are generated by a program and they follow the style the webmaster assigns. But they were not at all searchable. At least that is what everyone thought.

Why do search engines have problems with dynamically created pages?

Many search engines don't like dynamically created pages because they might get in an infinite loop if they follow some dynamically created pages. Google had an official statement about this in its webmaster guidelines:
"If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index."

What did Google change?

This entry has been removed from Google's guidelines. Here's the official statement from Google's blog:
"[Google now indexes] URLs that contain that parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewriting it -- we'll accept it just fine as is.

Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you.
If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls."

What does this mean to your web site?

If you have a dynamically created web site that uses only one or two parameters to create web pages then it's likely that Google can index your web pages without problems.

Now that is all good right? So should you go out and make your site a dynamiclly created one? Let us not get too hasty and foolish. Sure dynamiclly created pages are good but at the same time old school tactics still work best when it comes to SEO. Building a site the right way is what it is all about.

For that all I can say is get in touch with professionals. SEO guys know exactly what it takes to make a site look great, load fast, and get indexed. Trust Professionals like the guys at Position Front Page Suppling SEO Services to clients in Thailand.

What makes for a great webpage? Part III

Now to finally conclude this article, I have decided to let you in on a few SEO tips, secrets and tricks. Be careful how you use them. Like everything else in life moderation is a good thing. Welcome to Part III

6. Search Engine Optimization

Yahoo, MSN and Google is where you want to be found. The reality is that those three search engines account for almost 80% of all the search queries made on the net by users. Optimizing your site to meet the requirements of all three sites can be a chore. I have already written two articles on how to optimize your site for Yahoo and MSN and you can find them here, SEO Secrets For Yahoo's Engine and SEO Techniques For MSN. Read them and see what I mean.

Or grab our RSS feed

Optimizing your website for Google requires more than one article and eventually I will get around to writing it. But here are the basics. Keep your pages no more than three clicks away from the main page. Make sure that you link all your pages to your index page. Be very careful about over using your Keywords or Keyword Phrases. Provide a content rich page. This may be the single most important thing you do. Content is vital to Google. Make friends with others in your specialty and make a deal to exchange links to each others sites. Listen I know what you are thinking they are the competition why should I link to them? Hey, I say be real. Find others that are in a similar specialty not the exact same one. Try to get established as being an authority in that field. Google loves that, and most of all have a little patient. Google will find you and if you keep your nose clean they will rank you good. We tell all our clients this "let us do it right because second chances are really rare with Google.

7. Prepare a robots.txt file and a sitemap.xml file.

You can find really good site mapping sites online. Just search for them. Make a site map and a readable site map using html code. Makes sure you have a link to it you’re your home page and it back. For Yahoo make a site map too but not in xml format, instead make it in a txt file. Put each link on a separate line. No fancy coding required for Yahoo.

Many experts believe that your robots.txt file should be blank. I disagree. You should have some snippet of code on it. Use this it works wonders.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /azr94v2hh2lg/

This allows all bots into your site but keeps them away from directory azr94v2hh2lg. You don’t have a directory by that name. Its ok you don’t need one. Believe it or not the bots will crawl through the entire site looking for this folder just so they don’t enter it. Now that is a sure fire way to have the bots look through all your content. Imagine the fun when they find new links, indexing the pages as they come across them. Yeah I know I should have kept that a secret! I expect you to.

8. Blogs

No matter what they tell you BLOGS are still in. Using blogging software/structure that comes with such free blogging software as Wordpress will optimize your pages for you. Blogging systems have a linking hierarchy (categories, archives, etc.) that are very search engine friendly. It's almost impossible not to optimize your pages if you're using a blogging system. Plus, you have an RSS feed that will syndicate your content and place it into the search engines very quickly. Darn it I did it again gave away another perfectly good secret.

9. The biggest kept secret

You all know that I will be fired after this gets out. So I hope someone will offer me a job somewhere. I don’t need much just a roof over my head will do, on some tropical island! OK, when the net was still in its infancy, a group of brilliant men and women, decided that blind people or deaf people would get so much out of the computer. So the changed the way a computer works so to speak, in order to give the disabled a new lease on life. Many of those systems came with text editors only for screen display. So what if you had a sight with some visually stunning pictures. Well HTML wrote the IMG tag with and ALT extension. The ALT tag would contain a description of the image.

Google gives the ALT tag significant relevance. And I mean big time importance! So listen up. Put your primary keywords in the ALT tag followed by a brief description of the image. Google loves that and believe me they find you. No need to go to them. No other search engine treats ALT tags with the same respect. How we found this out is truly a story in itself.

We had a page on our site about our company policy. On the right side of the page we had gif files that linked to Search Engine sites. One gif file had an ALT tag filled out with our primary keyword phrase and a description of the gif. The primary keyword did not appear anywhere else on the page. Not even in the title or description or even in the meta tag keywords, because we had left it out. Well one day we were conducting a manual search of our keywords and there it was. Along with three or four other pages Google found, it first found this one lonely page with one ALT tag….So use them and use them wisely. Don’t over load them with your keywords. If you have twenty keywords and twenty images then use one in each image. Don’t over use them. Don’t use the same keyword twenty times. Three times may be pushing it.

I’m done now and I have kept a trick or two to myself, for future considerations. And if you’d like to hire me, I welcome all offers. Bye for now!

Archie Glikakis
SEO Consultant
Position Front Page

What makes for a great webpage? Part II

You are about to embark on a journey into SEO hell. I have tried my best to keep this as simple as I can but it is about to get confusing. We'll try to cover three major points today. Enjoy the reading!

3. Your Menu System

Forget the Flash, JavaScript, PHP, and ASP stuff you have gone out to learn to create flashy drop down or glittering menus or image swaps. That's far too much coding. We want to keep the page's code down to a minimum. Beside you could create most of that with CSS.

A great webpage will have an easy and simple menu system. Make sure you link your pages to and from your main index page. and don't forget about linking to and from your sitemap page. Expert web designers usually put all their main links on their site at the top or the bottom of all their web pages, so that a visitor can freely move around and find what they're looking for. Sidebar menu systems are passé. Besides that space can be used for something else, like more good content.

Ok now this point we can't stress enough, CHEACK THAT ALL YOUR LINKS WORK! Check every single page, especially if you link out to other sites. Search Engines hate broken links, so do your visitors, and it gives off the appearance that you are a Mickey Mouse operation.

Verify if all images on your page display properly. Nothing brings down the quality of a site faster than images that don't load. or images that come out blank.

4. Code vs Content

Whenever we get a client who is having a problem getting ranked, the first thing we check is the ration between code and content. Search Engines truly despise code heavy sites. Their spiders have to dig too deep and they waste too much CPU power. After a while and nothing to show for it the spider pulls away. Expect a drop in ranking or worse be accused of being a spammer. So go back to basics write simple HTML code. Use an externally linked style sheet. Don't add to many tables in tables in tables...That's just too much code. Get online instead and learn good CSS.

Cascading Style Sheets are an excellent way to create some WOW factor. Learn the ways of the Pros. Your content to code ratio should be better than 30% text. Shoot for 50%. Never accept 10-25%. If you find yourself close to that 30% mark but can't cut any more code out, add text silly. But don't add junk text, add good enjoyable reading. If you have run out of ideas for content and now I'm going to share something with you that I shouldn't, get an RSS feed on the topic of your site. I will tell you a lot more about that in my final chapter, but RSS Feeds are a great way to add fresh content to your site, and balance that code vs text ratio.

5. The WOW Factor

We have been asked about this so many times that i think most people just don't get the point. Using intense graphics and Flash animations is great if you are IBM and or have a billion dollar ad budget. To be perfectly honest I used to design sites all in Flash at one time. The looks awesome and soon my reputation as a web designer sky rocketed. Thing is sites like those are not Search Engine friendly.

So how do you create a WOW factor when you can't use fancy menu's and super flashy graphics? It is all in the layout. Good planning and careful programming can render some pretty impressive layouts. Add to that an easy to use menu system and incredible content and voila you have a WOW factor. The real professional look is simply awesome. Choose a neutral color scheme. Or if you are flamboyant choose a scheme which at least is easy on the eyes. Stick to browser safe colors. And most of all check the scheme out on several monitors. Not all are calibrated the same.

Our experience shows that almost 70% of our clients go with earth tones. Simple and clean with lots of white space. For text Black on white is still popular but we like dark grey on off-white. It is a lot easier on the eyes. A little known fact is that the average visitor reads less on the net and usually chooses to print out a long article. It is just a simple case of it being to hard on the eyes. So make your content printable too.

Professional websites are easily bookmarked. If your site contains useful information and keeps fresh content visitors will want to bookmark it or add it to their favorites. Using a small bookmark script and a favicon (a small logo you place on your site and it will be automatically picked up and displayed in your visitor's bookmarks), usually helps visitors add tour site to there bookmarks. Remember every little edge you can take is useful.

One more wow factor before I call it a day. Make sure you validate your site. Check the coding carefully. Broken code usually displays the stuff on the page poorly and you don't want that. At the same time badly coded pages are ignored by Search Engine Robots. Also when you have validated your site take the gif file from W3C to show everyone you are using Valid HTML code. It is a sign of professionalism and is highly regarded.

So next time I'll share with you some little known secrets. Maybe a snippet of code here and a little there just to get you on your way. See you next time.

Archie Glikakis
SEO Consultant
Position Front Page

What makes for a great webpage?

I bet you'd like to know the formula for creating a superior webpage? I am also sure you would love to hear the secrets we have acquired over years of experience of what it takes to make a webpage that will stand out and be noticed by your visitors. One that keeps your visitors returning to your site, again and again. One that is indexed by the major Search Engines and appears within the first 5 pages of the search results. And finally what it takes to design a page that is 95% better than all the rest on the web.

Because it makes for great reading, and against the wishes of my partners, I will tell all in this three part article.

Part I Keywords, Designs, and Optimization

1. Never Enough Said About Good Keywords

The foundation of any really good website is picking the right keywords or keyword phrases. It is, believe it or not, the ultimate factor that will determine the success or failure of your webpage. You must do some serious research on keywords or keyword phrases that will draw attention to your website. You must ensure that you can construct good informative content using those keywords or keyword phrases.

It is vital and the single most important ingredient of a your website. Do your homework assignment very carefully. Check the competition to see what keywords or phrases, they are using. Check the number of searches made each month for your keywords. Also check the keyword density of your page to see if it will register in the search engines. This last one requires some piece of software or an online solution.

2. Professional Design

Build a professional looking design. If you want an idea of what a professional site looks like take a look at our home page. Make sure your site is readable, free of both spelling and grammar mistakes. Also check what your webpage looks like in all types of browsers.

Keep the topic of your website in mind, stay focused on your keywords and use them throughout your content. Use the header tag to draw attention. Make sure you include your primary keyword or phrase in that header. Place headers as close to the top of the page as possible. Use the bold tag to highlight a point. Use bullet lists to itemize.

Another point that is always omitted by many SEO experts and website designers is the ratio of code vs readable text. A 50% split is awesome but not easy to achieve if you want some sort of design. We can accomplish this feat but that information will cost you! No I'm just kidding I will tell you all about how to do it in my next article, I promise.

Keep your sentences short and the number of words on a page between 450 to 900. Many sites break up longer descriptions into multiple pages, this will be of some inconvenience for your visitors but you will have more room for advertising. We don't like that too much and think it is a waste of time for the visitor. Instead make each page topic related, start and finish it on the same page. Don't make the users run around. A well built page will always have room for ads. And Ads should be content related. Don't offer adds to children's books when you sell auto parts.

The Content on your website will be an important factor to firstly, attract and the keep visitors coming back. So learn what it takes to become an authority in your field. Act like an expert by writing rich engaging content. Optimize that content with the keywords and keyword phrases you have selected. A trick we use is that we prepare content for each page and we focus on three or four keywords or keyword phrases, only. So if the guts of our site has only 5 pages we will have around 15 keywords or keyword phrases. Make sure that you read your content. Ensure that it is clear. Re-write it several times if need be then choose the best version. Being known as an expert in a field has some amazing results and puts you above the rest, so get informed.

A great webpage will always have fresh content. Make sure you update your webpage often. Technology changes rapidly, make sure your material is current and still relevant. Remember, 90% of the time, the only reason a visitor is on your page is for information. Make sure you deliver. Make sure that information is recent and accurate. Besides, there is nothing like fresh content to keep your visitors interested and coming back for more.

In Part II we will explore Navigation, the WOW factor, and Content vs Code.

Archie Glikakis
Position Front Page
SEO Consultant

Doorway pages are web pages that are created for search engines.

Doorway pages are often easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. Sometimes a doorway page is copied from another high ranking page. This can get very tricky as search engines can easily find identical pages. If you are going to build doorway pages then at least alter the content.

Most often, doorway pages just trick you into clicking on a link to get you to their desired destination page, or they use Javascript for redirection.

More sophisticated doorway pages, called Content Rich Doorways, are designed to gain high placement in search results without utilizing redirection. They incorporate at least a minimum amount of design and navigation similar to the rest of the site to provide a more human-friendly and natural appearance.

Doorway pages, sometimes use a method called cloaking. They show a version of that page to the visitor, but a different one is provided to crawlers, using server side scripts, usually Cgi. They know wether it's a bot or a visitor based on their Ip address or User-agent.

Doorway pages can be used responsibly. A good Seo guy will use a form of Content Rich Doorway Page to attact both search engine and user. It isn't hard to do but you must really know what you are doing. The last thing you want is to get in the black books of search engines, and that mean you will be banned from being indexed.

Doorway pages go by many names such as landing pages, bridge pages, portal pages, zebra pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages and more.

Whatever you want to call them is fine by me, I will only use a doorway page when I really need to get a client indexed ASAP. Otherwise, I play by the rules. Do not misunderstand they can be used effectively and legally, you simply need to know exactly how to construct one. Not too many people do so tread lightly if you intend on building one yourself. Seek the advice of a pro.

Archie Glikakis
SEO Consultant
Position Front Page

Choosing The Right Words

The first step is to generate a basic keyword list. This will be your starting point for further research. A simple way to do this is to brainstorm key terms for each one of your goals by thinking about what you would search for if you were looking for what you provide. It also helps to check your keywords by searching for them just to make sure you are on the right track.

Three Must Knows

First of all 34% of search engine users type 3 words into the search box. 26% type 2 words and 16% are still trying their luck with just one word. With the quantity of crap now on the net the onus is to tighten the search parameters. This means more words. Come up with Keyword Phrases instead. The search engine's crawlers then search for that specific phrase in their indexes.

Recently I wrote another article called Searching Search Engines. In that article I explained how surronding your search query in quotes can yeild a more refined search, and the message is catching on. Let's see how Google handles search. And let us use one of our clients as an example. Go to Google's home page type in data recovery Thailand. There are over 1 million listings. Google's engine is old school it will find and display all the indexed sites that contain either the word "data" or "recovery" or "Thailand". Not very good if you want a data recovery company located in Thailand right? But surround the three words in Quotes like so "data recovery Thailand" and you can clearly see quality results. Only 77 results and our client is number 3 on the page Save My Drive.

Portray Your Company Accurately

So what does this all mean for you? First choose keywords that accurately portray your company. Secondly, include a geographical location if you need to target a specific market, and Three don't spend money having others do keyword searches for you. Nobody knows your business better than you do. There are several Keyword tracker sites out there that can aid you in choosing keywords and some are free. Find them and use them. Make sure to type your selected keyword Phrases in a search engine's search box. Make a note of the number of results. Surround your query in quotes and try it again. Make a note of the number of results. What you are looking for is a relatively low number of results for both queries. But don't rely on the numbers if all else fails use the best Keyword Phrases that accuractely describe what you do.

Clarification

We need to just clear something up. Getting a good ranking is important and using good keywords is very important but the most important thing that you need to understand, placing these keywords on your page in the right place allows search engines to find them faster. As of today only Yahoo, still number one in our books for searches, and MSN, have the best search engine algorithm. Google prefers following links to create an index. For them the weight of inbound links plays a significant role in their PageRank formula. So choosing the right keywords and placing them properly on your website should be priority number one.

Title, and Meta Tags

After you have selected your Keyword Phrases, assign them numbers, ordering them from most important to least important. You should select about 10 Keyword Phrases. Plan to optimize your site for 3 to five of those keywords. Include your most important Keyword Phrase or Primary Keyword phrase, in your title.

Use the meta tag Description and write a short catchy paragraph about your site. Again try to include your primary Keyword Phrase at the start of the description. As a matter of fact see if you can include several more of youe Keyword Phrases, but don't exceed 200 characters.

Finally make sure you include the meta tag Keywords. Once more put your primary Keyword Phrase at the very beginning, then speparte each keyword Phrase or keyword with a comma.

Body Language

Perhaps the single most important factor is how you use your Keyword Phrases in your content. Search Engines like a keyword density of around 5-8% in your content. Make sure to include your primary Keyword Phrase at the very beginning and at the very end of your content. Combine a Keyword Phrase in a header tag. Use Keyword Phrases in Links and in Lists, as well as in the ALT tag of your images. But most of all write good content, no jibberish. For more info on writing good content see our article.

That about wraps up this post. Remember to choose keywords wisely. Use Keyword Phrases instead. Make phrases consisting of two or three even four words. Use them in your meta tags and regular tags. Finally write good rich keyword based content.

Archie Glikais
SEO Consultant
Position Front Page