Small businesses online has the same potential as their bigger competitors because they only have to have a good site and good products and services to entice customers to buy from them. When marketing offline, you have to have a good place for your business. If you are selling products, you need display cases for them and whatnot. On the other hand, if you are going to solely sell your products online, you would only need a place to store them saving you a lot of money.

If you have built your site to make it more appealing to search engines, you can even beat your competitors even if they paid more for the building of their site. You do not need a flashy website to have good Google rankings but you should also consider how your customers would like the layout of your site. It is best if you would work with a web developer and a programmer who knows how to make the site easy for search engine bots to read. The easier it is for the robots to read your site, the better chance you have of ranking well for the keyword you are targeting.

All in all, going online and expanding your network online is the best way for small business owners to level the playing field. With good search engine optimization techniques, they can easily attain good Google or Yahoo rankings which would result to more exposure for their brand and thus increasing sales. It can be done by working with a good SEO company which is not afraid to take on the challenge of taking an unknown brand and making it popular online.

Advanced Link Manager – Analyze your website’s link popularity, find link partners and valuable information about them.
Product Page: http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com

Rank Tracker SEO Tool – Rank Tracker is an all-in-one rankings monitoring SEO tool for webmasters and professional SEOs who need to monitor their site’s positions in more than 250 search engines.
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/

SERank – RAGE SERank will monitor search engine rankings for any number of keywords and display changes in a web site’s search engine rankings over any point of time.
Product Page: http://www.ragesw.com/products/search-engine-rank.html

Advanced Web Ranking – Advanced Web Ranking is a search engine ranking software that emulates a manual search through each search engine. It works exactly like if you were manually checking your keywords ranking position via a browser.
Product Page: http://www.advancedwebranking.com/

Link Assistant – A search engine optimization software program designed to automate the many tedious link building tasks us SEOs need to do on a daily basis. A complete, feature-rich, easy-to-use environment.
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/

iWeb SEO Tool – Quickly and easily optimize your iWeb based website for search engines then publish directly to your iDisk or FTP server without ever leaving the application.
Product Page: http://www.ragesw.com/products/iweb-seo-tool.html

SEO Spyglass – SEO SpyGlass is an extremely powerful competition research tool that is amazingly easy to use. In three simple steps SEO SpyGlass will show you exactly how your competitors got top positions in search engines so you can learn how they do it, improve on it, and get your own site ahead of them, in 232 local and international search engines!
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/

WordButler – A wordtracker competitor specifically designed for mac users.
Product Page: http://www.wordbutler.com/

I have checked a number blogs earlier and found out that most of them don’t care of the permalinks issue. If you’ll notice, wordpress permalink by default shows a question mark and numbers in it, obviously not search engine friendly. You can customize this by going to Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks section of your wordpress powered blog. You’ll see five options there for your permalink:

• Default – http://www.kontrapelo.com/?p=123
• Day and name – http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/sample-post/
• Month and name – http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/sample-post/
• Numeric – http://www.kontrapelo.com/archives/123
• Custom Structure – you can create your own here

Of all the choices, I usually prefer making it custom that don’t include the postdate. Why? Well, here’s the idea:

url #1: kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/wordpress-seo
url #2: kontrapelo.com/wordpress-seo

The first url above tells Google that “2008/09/12″ is more important than “wordpress-seo” as it is placed first. Placing the “date” first before your “name” structure pushes your keywords away. This is the best permalink structure for me but if you’re working a way to have your article featured in Google news which requires a 3-digit included in your url, it’s a no-no. If your wordpress blog already has 100 posts prior to targetting appearance in Google news, then something like “name/id” will do. If the blog is new, then work your way to have a 3-digit number in it. You can play around with the “year/month/date” placing it after the “name” structure.

In addition, I’ve read an article before (can’t remember where) saying Matt Cutts mentioned in WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco that the best permalink structure you can use is just the post title with hyphens.

Well, to make it simple, the whole idea here is to take a domain like http://kontrapelo.com and redirect it to http://www.kontrapelo.com consolidating all incoming links to a single domain, wether they use “www” or not.

Here’s a simple mod_rewrite rule you can add to .htaccess to accomplish this, put it above any other rewrite rules that you are using, you may want the other rules to apply to the www. domain after the initial redirect.

note: replace the sample domain with your own domain.
RewriteEngine on

#Redirect http://kontrapelo.com to http://www.kontrapelo.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^kontrapelo.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.kontrapelo.com/$1 [r=301,L]

Every participant will surely do everything they can just to grab the $5000 top prize, though black hat is not allowed, there’s surely one or two that will use it, either for the benefit of their sites or for pulling down other’s site and it makes me wonder what if that happens to me or any other participants? Well, it’s part of the game and makes it more exciting…

Honestly, I am not applying too much work for this busby seo challenge entry of mine as I’m a bit busy working for several clients the past few days, the only thing I’ve applied is just a few bookmarks and applying links from my other sites. Hopefully, I’ll have more time to work on this as I am also hoping to grab the top spot, not much for the prize but for the honor!

Here’s the list of prizes for the Busby SEO Challenge:
First Prize: $5000
Second Prize: $2000
Third Prize: $500

The prize at stake is high so this will be a competitive one.

RULES

* Start date is 1st June 2008, 12:00midday, Perth, Western Australia at which point the phrase will be posted on the Busby website.
* End date of 31st August 2008, 12:00 midday, Perth, Western Australia.
* Only ethical SEO techniques may be engaged and the judges reserve the right to review the techniques engaged by the winner to ensure they comply.
* No pornography, no discrimination and no illegal behaviour is permitted.
* The competition is only open to domain and sub domain names that do not include the key phrase in any form
* Only registered entrants are eligible to compete and win the prize. Busby will maintain a list of entrants which can be view on the Entrants List page.
* Registration is free, open to anyone of any age, gender, race and domicile and can only be made through Registration Process.
* All entrants pages must have a visible link back to www.busbywebsolutions.com with the following text (including the hyperlink) in Arial 10 font:

* Only one prize per person.
* Employees, franchisees and licensees of Busby (and each of their family members) are eligible to enter but are not eligible to win any prizes.

Goodluck to everyone who’s joining.

XML is short for Extensible Markup Language made to transport structured data across different systems and platforms.

I remember an article from W3C pointing out the following things:

• XML is for structuring data
• XML looks a bit like HTML
• XML is text, but isn’t meant to be read
• XML is verbose by design
• XML is a family of technologies
• XML is new, but not that new
• XML leads HTML to XHTML
• XML is modular
• XML is the basis for RDF and the Semantic Web
• XML is license-free, platform-independent and well-supported

This supports the explanation that xml was created to manage uses of structured data in the web. RSS is a good example of a modified xml format which carries headlines and contents of your blog.

Also note that xml is not replacing html, it is for describing the data and its structure while the latter focuses on how data looks.

If you have a blogger account, you might want to check it as I was just informed that all blogspot hosted blogs lost their pageranks. Upon knowing this, I immediately checked all my blogspot blogs and I can confirm that it’s true. I have several blogspot blogs with pageranks varying from 1-4 and they are all gone now. I have also checked some of my friends and some well known blogspot blogs and found that they have lost their pr’s too.

Something’s happening at the moment, we just don’t know what it is yet so let’s wait and see…

In a recent thread in SEOPhilippines forum, a certain guy posted an ad with a promising seo career waiting for the perfect candidate. He also replied in another thread wherein other members are having a discussion about the starting salary of a fresh graduate hired to do seo. He stated in the thread that he recently hired a Filipino seo and provided the following luxury (if you can call it luxury):

• a brand new computer with 22″ monitor
• access to the swimming pool in his condo
• fed the hired guy while he worked for him
• worked in a great environment on the 25th floor of his apartment
• paid him $1,500 every week
• promised incentives and pay raises

Doubting the credibility of the poster, I made a little search about him based on the email address he left and found a post from another site wherein he is looking for seo too, posted last year yet a good reason to challenge the credibility of this guy wherein he states that he’s just a retired person and not rich. Yes he might have turned rich within that short period but I found another ad he posted in craigslist wherein the job location will be in Makati. This made me more confused on the credibility of this guy. If he’s got a place in Makati, then why ask someone to work in his condo. Isn’t it more comfortable to work in an office environment than in a condo which is considered to be a private place, unless you have turned it into a real office. And dissecting his luxurious offer, what’s so special with a 22″ monitor? He’s feeding the guy while he’s working for him, what does he think with other seo, not eating when working! He’s having a big misconception about local seo players. And for a salary as big as $1500 per week, I wonder why the guy he claimed he hired lasted only 4 days as he said as this is a good amount compared to others.

This could be some form of scam so better be aware folks! I just hope this is not the same guy who’s buying links for Php30.00 pasaload (cellphone load worth $0.75 in a dollar) who’s been harrasing local seo practitioners during the Yahoo Group days…

I have compiled some of the free keyword research tools that I have used and currently using for my seo projects. If you can add more, please feel free to leave it in the comment section and if I find it useful, I’ll add it in the list.

1. http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html – This tool generates the top 100 keywords compiled and collected from a total of 181 search engines worldwide
2. http://www.iwebtool.com/keyword_lookup/ – This tool provides list of keywords looked up via the 3 major search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. It shows number of searches per day and per month
3. http://www.spyfu.com – This tool is one of the best I have used with its amazing feature wherein you can view stats of adwords for a certain keyword. You’ll get to know number of search results, total advertisers, clicks per day, cost per click and possible cost per day
4. https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal – This tool provides advertiser competition, previous month search volume, and average search volume. It also gives suggestions on related keywords to consider
5. http://www.googleduel.com/original.php – This tool compares competition between two keywords
6. http://www.gorank.com/seotools/ontology/ – This tool provides synonymous terms for a certain keyword entered

There are more free keyword research tools out there, I’ll make an update on this post whenever I see one which is useful. Feel free to add yours too.