Tomorrow is the 1st day of February already. And if you are all aware, here at BlogDeManila, the 1st of the month is Blog Backup Day. I have written numerous articles already the importance of having a monthly backup, not only on your local hard disk but also using online backup as well.

Cloud computing is the latest buzz that resurfaced recently in the IT industry. It’s not new anymore. In reality, you’ve been using cloud computing for the past decades already.  For example, when you are reading your emails such as Yahoo or GMail using a browser, that is called cloud computing. Same when you upload your pictures on Facebook.

With the introduction of virtual servers, not to mention the low cost of hardware acquisition, online backup using “cloud” has sprouted all over. Every now and then, new companies offering online backup keeps on popping up with better options and features. As a user, this is where the dilemma  comes in. Which company truly offers the best solution?

Well, the right solution can be found on some some review sites that check regularly which among the key players in the market that can be considered as the top online backup provider. It’s is better to check them first before making your decision.

One particular feature that I’m looking for a review site is the real and genuine consumer reviews.  I even personally check the website of the reviewer (if it’s available), just to make sure their comments and suggestions are not system generated but a honest to goodness review. After checking the credentials of the recommended company, I then ask feedback on some reputable webmaster’s forums about their experiences.  My decisions is solely based on the facts that I gathered.

Putting our trust in a reputable company when it comes to backing up our data is must. You need to do your assignment in choosing the best provide. Don’t rely on Google search only.  You have to sift through them by checking various review sites, and ask those who are using those services already.

And please, don’t ever forget to backup your blog!

I just came back from a long weekend holiday, again. I did not check my emails during the vacation because I wanted to  dedicate my whole time to my family.

When we arrived home last night, I’d checked my emails and one subject line,  “Are Meta Keywords Dead”?, caught my attention. I thought it was a spam since it was Halloween the previous day.  However, the email that I received came from a fellow blogger, who is starting to tweak her blog  for search engine optimization purposes. Additionally, she asked me  how important meta keywords are and if they are still relevant since most of the websites and blogs are still using it.

In September 2009, Google announced that they don’t use meta keywords tag anymore in their web search. Barely, less than a month Yahoo announced that meta keywords tag receives the lowest ranking signal in their algorithm. Words that appear in the body, title, description are more valuable in ranking a specific page.

Bing, the Microsoft search engine, on the other hand is still using the meta keywords tag but not for ranking purposes. According to Duane Forrester, a Senior Product Manager for Bing, they are using meta keywords tag to as a signal for finding spammers.

If Google is not using meta keywords tag anymore, while Yahoo sometimes is using it if other signals are not present, and Bing is using it as part of their signal in looking for spammers, then the question remains — is it safe to use meta keywords tag? And if it is safe, what is the most appropriate format? What if you have already in your blog or website,  will you panic and get rid of it?

We cannot deny the fact that Google, Yahoo and Bing are the top 3 major search engines out there. We must listen to what they say. And since, no one from these three mentioned the use of meta keywords tag will get your site banned, then it is safe to conclude that yes you can still use meta keywords tag. What they really don’t like is “stuffing” your blog with keywords, specially those not related to the content of your page.

One of the search engine optimization techniques that I’ve learned when it comes to meta keywords tag is to use the tag itself within the content or body of the page. If you plan to keep using keywords, use it only once on the meta keywords tag and use the same keyword on the first paragraph of your  content, in the middle of the body and at the last paragraph.  One more thing, limit the keywords to not more than 10.

So are you still going to use meta keywords tag? Let me know your thoughts on this subject.

After arriving from our 10-day vacation, I saw myself running to and fro from all sorts of activities.

We arrived slightly right after midnight  of  Saturday and just less than 2 hours of sleep later on, I ran with my wife and son for the 5KM race of Adidas King of the Road. It was supposed to be a race but it turned out to be a fun run for all of us because we ran following our son’s phase.

Last Tuesday, my wife and I watched the concert of Black Eyed Peas. I almost lost my voice in singing and shouting with the crowds. From a quiet blogger, I was converted into a party animal in just few hours. It’s was also my wife’s birthday so the concert was sort of a treat for her. We both enjoyed the concerts together with some of our friends.

And last night, Wednesday, my whole family rushed to Alaminos, Pangasinan (250KM from Manila) to attend to our friend’s wake. He died of stroke at a young age of 43. We left Manila by 6PM, and reached Alaminos by 12:30AM after traveling for more than 6 hours. Alaminos is the home of the famous Hundred Islands. We only stayed on the wake for 2 hours and left by 3:30AM to be on time in my work at 9AM.

I’ve spent the whole day trying to finish a project and at the same time getting in touch with different resorts near Hundred Island where we will spend the long weekend next week. Actually our long weekend will start on early morning of Sunday until Tuesday because we also have a scheduled Mask-A-Ride – a bike fun ride where bikers are don with different colorful costumes and their bikes decorated with different lights and other bling-bling.

I think you can already imagine how busy I am including my family as well. And so tonight, my wife called for a message therapist so we can have a home message which both of us badly needed.

Please bear with me if I can’t post regularly. I hope I can go back to my regular programming by next week, but I’ll do my best to write one post by tomorrow about SEO. Some of our sites and blogs were slapped by Google Panda recently and I’ll tell you on how to avoid being a victim or how to recover from it.

Until then.

I’m sorry to all my readers because I was not able to follow-up my previous post right away. I’m busy with setting up an office, yes a physical office, not for me but for my client.

My client is based in Canada and my task was  to setup an office here in the Philippines so they can hire more staff for their projects. After searching and making negotiations for the past three weeks, finally we will move-in to the new office tomorrow.  My final tasks is to bring the various equipments tomorrow.  Wait, just a correction, I will not transfer there but  I’ll oversee everything at “arms length” so to speak.

Anyway, I really want to avoid writing a post about my topic today because, honestly, you can search  Google on “How To Choose A Domain Name” and you will be presented with almost 80million hits!

BUT with the recent change to Google’s Ranking algorithm, there are some facts  that you should know if you want to be on Google’s top ranking.

Here’s one fact that I’ve learned recently -  Google delisted, deindexed or clearly banned all .CO.CC. To prove it,  enter “site:.co.cc” in your Google search engine and see the results.  This affected all .CO.CC domains starting last month of June, 2011. So the rule of the thumb is, if you want Google to recognize you… Avoid .CO.CC  as part of your domain.

What does this mean? It simply means Top Level Domains are still the King when it comes to choosing the right domain! Google is giving priority to sites and links derived from Top Level Domains (TLDs) such as .com, .net, .org etc..  This means that you should be using a Top Level Domain  with relevant keyword(s) for your blog, affiliate pages and/or sales pages.  Here’s another rule of the thumb, .COM is still the King of the Kings when it comes to TLDs but according to my own experiment, a good SEO can beat any .COM!

I’ve mentioned the word(s) Keyword(s) on my previous statement. Why? Because Google  still (even with the Panda update) values a keyword within the domain name for ranking purposes.

For example, if you will search for the words ” Manila Blog”, I assure you that BlogDeManila will be in the first page of the search engine results page (SERP). Why? Because the words are there! “Manila” + “Blog” are both in BlogDeManila domain but since both terms are not in the front, BlogDeManila will be having a hard time to beat those who are actively using “Manila Blog”.

So another rule of  thumb in choosing a domain name, Keyword(s) works much better  when it is placed in the beginning than having another word in front of your keyword.

For those who might be asking where do I get my domain names, I will honestly tell you that I’m getting all my domains from GoDaddy and 1and1. I find them both very easy to use, specially to new bloggers or users,  when it comes to choosing and buying domain names. Both have the tools to search for the keywords and both can be paid using PayPal as well.

If you’re looking for the best domain, you may use this tool to search for it:

Well, I won’t bore you with much technical details. I hope you will learn a lesson or two from my post today. Till my next post.

Is it possible to get a backlinks for a 1 day old blog or website without…

- Submitting your site to directory?

- Exchanging links?

- Commenting on other blogs?

- Press release?

You might be wondering, how can it get backlinks if it’s not even indexed by the search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and Google?

Yes, it’s very possible and I did it with the latest niche blog that I’ve just setup containing one post only!

And now I want to turn this into case study. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you the secrets as time goes by. Promise, I won’t bore you with technical details. If you  are curios on how I did it, keep reading.

To start with, I bought a new domain a month ago which I’m planning to sell later on,  but I decided instead to a make a mini-niche site out of it instead. Since I was able to make one of my niche site to be listed on page 1 of Google and got a PR in less than 3 months, I decided to try it on a new domain and applying all the SEO and other tricks I’ve learned over the years. Mind you, these are white hat SEO tricks, no gray nor black hat or any other magic voodo here.

BUT, that’s a big BUT here,  I’m using cheat sheets which I’ve documented and planning to share in this case study that I’m doing. Let me know if you are interested and I’ll tell you everything all the tricks I’ve under my sleeve. If you are, I encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed so you’ll get the latest update from me.

Of course, just like any blog that I’ve set up for my own personal consumptions, my main goal is to monetize it. Come on, doesn’t most bloggers wants to earn? However, for this journey, I want all BlogDeManila readers to learn from these tips ((Warning: if you already know them – just don’t read any further), and I’ll write in a procedural way so you can follow step by step.

Again, the lessons you will learn here might be too basics for some but I hope you will still learn one trick or two. You can always unsubscribe from my RSS, if you think that you are not learning anything and if you feel I’m wasting your time. I’m sorry there’s no money back guarantee here, because I’m not selling you anything.

And again, the succeeding posts on this case study, although I’ve tried to be as accurate and complete as possible, I don’t guarantee that the contents are accurate due to very fast changing of SEO landscape. The tricks that I’ve applied today might not be permissible tomorrow. Like anything else, there are no guarantees whatsoever, including increase in traffic and SERP, and of course the most important thing – in monetary value. Results may vary according to your background, willingness to learn and passion on what you are doing.

I encourage you to leave your comments here if you are really interested,  so I’ll be encourage as well in writing my succeeding post. If you have any questions, you can already start to ask them now. And, don’t forget to subscribe to RSS.

For those who are into SEO, webmasters and bloggers who simply want to know the latest Google page rank of their blog, here’s a good news for all of you. Google rolled out a major Page Rank update yesterday, 27th June 2011. I’m not expecting a major update for this month not even for the next two months because of Google’s late roll out in their previous update. So this latest Page Rank update is unexpected.

Bad news is, blogdemanila was demoted by 1 PR.  The good news is almost all my niche sites were  upgraded! I’m aware that I haven’t promoted BlogDeManila for the past few months because I’m busy in promoting my other blogs and I know this is the only reason why it was demoted. No hurt feelings, this is still a good news for me, considering the fact that I don’t earn much here (based Ad networks).  4 of my niche sites were upgraded and 2 remain the same. So, for overall performance, the latest Google PageRank update is still favorable and I’m glad my sites were not affected by Google Panda.

What about you? Have you checked the latest Google PageRank of your site? Let me  know the results.

And for those who did not benefit from the Google Page Rank, don’t lose hope. PageRank is important in the eyes of Google but it’s not the end of everything. I have one niche site with Page Rank of 0 but I’m earning more on it than my other 3 sites combined.

You may want to read some tips on how to make your Google PageRank increase:

1. Build high quality sites using Google standards.
2. Make Your Site Visible To Google And Other Search Engines
3. 3 Tips For Creating a Google-Friendly Site
4. Improve PageRank by Linking Automatically
5. SEO Here, SEO There, SEO Everywhere: The Secret – Revealed!
6. WordPress SEO Secrets
7. Use Drag and Drop WordPress Theme – a Super Optimized wordpress theme.

When I first installed WordPress more than 4 years ago on my 2nd blog, I admit that I fell in love with it.  It’s what you call “love at first sight”. Since then, there’s no turning back for me.

Being an I.T. consultant for more than a decade already, I’ve used various tools in developing website from Notepad (do you believe it?), HTML editors, Dreamweaver, Mambo, Joomla and more. But nothing beats WordPress in features that I’m looking for. All my clients websites are based on WordPress engine, whether they are blogs, corporate sites or just a simple mom and pop front store page.

Here Are My 7 Top (Personal) Reasons Why I’m Using WordPress

1. Great Price @Free – Who wouldn’t want free lunch? Yup, you don’t have to pay anything when you install except of course your domain and hosting. Compared it to other tools such as Dreamweaver which, as of this writing, will cost you almost US$400. Thanks to open source community, WordPress is  provided for FREE!

2. Very, very Easy to Install – Based on my experience, the hardest part of installing WordPress is setting up the database but, only if you want to install it manually. If not, it’s just one-click if your hosting is using Fantastico installer.

3. Very, very Easy to Upgrade – Specially with version 3 and up, upgrading themes, plugins and WordPress core itself is almost all in one-click already. No need to download anything if you are upgrading from the Admin dashboard.

4. Optimized for Search Engines – in short SEO. By default, WordPress is already set to be SEO friendly from page titles, summaries, permalinks, categories, blogrolls, feed submissions (pinging), meta tags  and sitemaps. There are also a number of third party plugins that will further improve WordPress SEO.

5. CMS is Pretty Damn Easy – I have clients where I developed their websites using WordPress and nothing else. These client of mine are not into blogging but they are my corporate clients. By tweaking some codes and changing the look-and-feel of the Admin dashboard, my clients doesn’t notice that their corporate website  is running in WordPress framework. In fact, WordPress has been awarded in 2010 as Open Source CMS Hall of Fame.

6. Themes and Plugins – I call these additional tools as magic tricks of WordPress. They are like wizards to me. They can extend WordPress and do almost anything you want to do. Upload a new theme and you can turn your WordPress to your eyes desire. Plugins on the other hand are “little but smart wizards”  that were designed to modify, customize, optimize and add functionality. There’s no WordPress site out there that is not using a theme or a plugin. Do you agree?

7. Vibrant and Wide support of the Community - Just try to throw in a question in Google and you will surely see an answer already. You will always find the solutions for any questions, and the community is always willing to help when you are stuck with a problem. There’s always the lifeline that you can depend on. WordPress is an open source software and is being developed, maintained and improved by hundreds of people. These group of silent brains are all working hard to make every version of WordPress surpass the previous one.

You can do a lot with WordPress. You have the power to control almost every thing on it. The limits are really only set by your own imagination and abilities. If you are just starting, try get web host provider that has WordPress on their Control Panel already such as BlueHost and Hostgator. WordPress is a secured platform but sometimes the web host is not, so don’t take chances.

So why am I using WordPress? My short answer is… WordPress is FUN!

Now tell me, why are you using WordPress? If not, then Why Not?

You don’t want Google to ban your site…

Or you don’t want your site to banished among the million pages Google searchbot is searching everyday.

Do you?

Well, I think there will be more harm if you will not follow their guidelines. Don’t you think so?

Besides the Webmaster Guidelines that Google strongly encourage you to follow, Google recently released more guidelines based on the new “Panda” algorithm. This additional tweak to Google’s ranking algorithm had made a big impact for a large number of sites, and yes, including blogs.

So instead of explaining the new guidelines, Google on the other hand has released questionnaires to make it easier for site owner to find out if their web page content is good enough for Google’s new quality filters.

Below are the sets of questions that Google has published that can help you to judge the quality of your site:

On Trustworthiness:

• Would you trust the information presented in your article?
• Is the article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to the site?
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
• For a health related query, would you trust information from the site?
• Would you recognize the site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
• Is the website the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
• Would users complain when they see pages from the site?

Page uniqueness:

• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

Over all quality of the pages:

• Does the article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
• How much quality control is done on content?
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
• Does the article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
• Would you expect to see the article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

Human interests and not for search engines:

• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?

Pages with enough real content:

• Does the article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
• Does the article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?

There you are dear readers, unless there’s a search engine that is bigger than Google, then we don’t have a choice for now but to follow the leader.

Does your blog follows these guidelines already or do you have to improve it?

Learn The Top 3 Major Components That Is Important To The Search Engines Like Google

That should have been the title of my post today. Unfortunately, based on my previous post, a lot of bloggers were cautious if their blog or site will be banned by Google for using some tricks in their back link building efforts. I guess a lot of my readers are aware of what happened to JCPenney being banned or sandboxed by Google for using black hat tactics.

Afraid of Google Ban? Read for more information

According to the news,as reported by New York Times, JCPenney created a lot of buzz in time for the 2010 holiday season. Unfortunately, it was found out that thousands of unrelated web sites were sending link juices to JCPenney.com. This is a broad day light cheating, at least to the eyes of search engines.  As I’ve mentioned in my last post, linking strategies takes time and lot of efforts. If you will hire an SEO company or a professional to do it for you, make it a point that company or individual is not using black hat SEO tactics. This is a crucial step in choosing for the right SEO company if you don’t want Google to de-listed your website.

Now, instead of looking for the negative aspect of back link buildings or linking strategies, let’s concentrate our focus on the major components that are relevant not only for the search engine but for the readers as well.

1. Great and Relevant Content. By having a great content and relevant, you are not attracting the readers but the search engine as well. Make sure you contents are unique and don’t just stuff it with keywords. Create content the users and the search engines would grow to love.
2. Build Natural Backlinks. Don’t ever participate in any linking schemes.  If you remember, I promoted a backlink tool where you can submit your URLs and they will be automatically submitted on their own network. There’s nothing wrong in using an automated software in building back links. The tool that I’ve mentioned, even though it is a legal way to build natural links,  I suggest that you be cautious in using it. Don’t be greedy in submitting your sites. Take it slowly, make it natural by pacing it over time rather than getting 200 or more links in one month and nothing on the following.
3. Submit Site Map. This is one of the requirements of most search engines if you want your site to get index and rank. Submitting a site map will help the search engine spider to craw your site properly. It can identify easily the pages that belonged to your site. If you want to know how to submit your site to Yahoo and Google, you may want to check the instructions here: Submitting your Sitemap file to Search Engines

The three major components that I’ve mentioned here are just some of the things that you can D-I-Y SEO for your site or blog. They are not hard to implement but please take not that optimization is just one of the tools that you can use in promoting your site. I hope that you will see an improvement in your traffic from the major search engines after applying the  major components described above.  The only thing that I can assure you is, if you follow them then expect a great result.

For more information, I encourage you to check the following:

1. SEO Tips – All you need to do to have a site optimized for SEO

2. SEO Tools to Help you Rank Higher

3. SEO Services Firm you can count on

I’m managing 10 blogs already and part of my task every single day is building backlinks. As you (my regular readers) already  know building backlinks to your pages is a very important of SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) for two reasons.

1. It helps your pages get indexed faster, which is very important because you want the search engines to find them as soon as possible and crawl them regularly.

2. It helps your pages get higher search engine rankings for the keywords of your choice.

The more backlinks you have, the better. Period.

I’ve been building backlinks for more than three years now and I can personally tell you that it’s a time-consuming, boring process.

If you are a member of any outsourcing companies like PeoplePerHour or GetFreeLancer, you will notice that one of the most sought job there is an SEO specialist and/or a Backlink builders. If you own a blog or website  you can outsource the process to an agency like the two that I’ve mentioned, and pay a lot of money… Or you can do it yourself with SocialMonkee!

SocialMonkee is an instant backlink builder allowing you to build 25 unique backlinks, every day, FREE! All links are on unique C-Class IP addresses and domains. Imagine being able to create 25 unique backlinks every day, with the click of a button, FREE! Well, you can stop imagining…

What are C-Class IP addresses and domains? I’m planning to put up another post for this one, but for the benefits of this post, let me simply define C-Class IP addresses and domains as unrelated IP addresses that allows you (as a user, blogger or webmaster) to create a fleet of websites that interlink without being red-flagged by Google or other search engines.

So, 25 unique backlinks every day… That’s a total of 175 backlinks every week, 750 every month.

SocialMonkee is still relatively new. In fact, this was launched only this month!

If you’re 100% serious about getting your website to the top of Google and the other major search engines, don’t read any further. Join SocialMonkee now while it’s still free!