Sounds Good so Let’s Get Writing!

In a post-Panda world (Panda was a semi-recent Google update) article marketing looks like a less viable strategy than before. Firstly the article directories, such as e-zine articles, got clobbered in the ratings. The amount of link juice and authority they pass on was greatly diminished. Secondly, all those links, coming in from those who clone your content for their sites, got clobbered too.

OK, so Let’s Not Do Article Marketing!

Hold your horses. The truth is that article marketing isn’t dead either. It may have lost its golden boy status but it still brings quite a few benefits that are worth pursuing. We think article marketing is still worth your effort as long as you use this guide:

One article per directory – at least for the vast majority of directories. Take the authority and page rank they pass on but don’t spend too much time marketing to a dead space. The exception to this rule is if the directory is passing you lots of direct traffic, then you might want to concentrate on developing that space.

One article of value per directory – if you want your content to really work for you, make the links in it worth clicking in the first place. E-zine articles can be a great source of traffic in its own right.

Don’t forget it’s not just directories that take articles – in fact sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages got a bit of a boost following the Panda update.

Don’t forget guest blogging is a form of article marketing – guest blogs are worth their weight in gold if you’re posting on sites with a following, no matter what their actual page rank may be.

Analyse the results of your article marketing. This is the one bit many people forget to do. Article marketing will almost certainly result in good results in certain niches. In others, particularly those that have been 100% saturated in the past, you may find it’s not worth the effort.

Article marketing can still be a good source of traffic. It’s certainly an easy way to build some initial back links. It’s a good idea to focus on long-tail keywords for this purpose. Your articles are much easier to find on the basis that the title is search engine friendly. You can also establish yourself as an expert in your niche more easily when a search for your name shows over 100 sites with articles you’ve written about your speciality.

The post Article Marketing is it Worth the Hassle? appeared first on Cambodia SEO.

That’s right, we said it – Google rankings are not the reason for SEO.

Why not?

Great question and one that needs answering by any SEO company before they start working for you. It’s very simple. Google will not be buying any goods or services from you. Think about it. If your website is just there to win the Google war, then it’s not doing its job.

Your website is for people. People who may well want to spend their time and money on your website. However, if your text is pure search engine spam then you may have the rank but you’ll never see the cash.

SEO Cambodia: 5 Tips for Your Website

SEO Cambodia Tip 1: Keywords are important but not to your readers.

We find that in general people place too much importance on keywords though. Your content needs to be written for people to read first and foremost. In this post we want “SEO Cambodia” to rank with the search engines. However, we also don’t want to stuff the phrase in where it doesn’t fit. So we’ve tried not to. Instead we’ve constrained it to the title and some headings.

You can read the text without it grinding you down. We want the rankings sure. We just don’t want you to think we’re illiterate while we get them.

SEO Cambodia Tip 2: Content is King

Here’s another thing they neglect to tell people in SEO school. They’re too busy teaching people methods to game the search engines. Yet without interesting well written content, your site is a waste of air time. Nobody wants to spend money with a business that can’t invest in spell check or make a decent stab at proper grammar.

Give more than you take and your customers are going to trust you. Take more than you give and they’ll look elsewhere. You don’t have to be a fantastic writer. You do need to share information freely.

SEO Cambodia Tip 3: Links shouldn’t be for Links’ Sake

People have forgotten the value of a good link. Why? Because real links take time and effort to create. Sure, you can spam your keyword as a link on every site from here to kingdom come and if you’re lucky you’ll get some search engine rankings for it. But why do it like that?

If you run a hotel wouldn’t it be great if you had a single link on the BBC Travel website? Isn’t that likely to drive business directly to you? There’s no need for Google at all. People start reading about Cambodia and then they find you! Direct traffic is the ideal way to gain business. Don’t assume that every purchase starts and ends with a search engine.

SEO Cambodia Tip 4: 400 words is not an objective

I know, there’s a million articles online saying that you have to write 400 word pieces for Google to look at your site. It’s rubbish. You can write a fully informative article in 200 words sometimes and in other instances you’ll need a whole lot more space.

Real blogs, real websites, written by people for people, contain a good mix of content. Long articles and short ones too.

SEO Cambodia Tip 5: Regular Updates are Vital

Not only does Google like to see you update your website on a regular basis, so do visitors. If you want to encourage people to come back (and thus increase your chances of winning their business) there has to be a reason for them to do so.

A blog can often help because it’s simple to update in house as long as you’re using a Content Management System. You don’t have to devote all your time to creating content around your keywords either. In the long run some interest pieces that relate to your business can often add a vital “spark” of personality to your site that helps differentiate you from the rest of the pack.

If you’ve enjoyed our “SEO Cambodia” tips and think we might be able to help with your marketing development, why not get in touch today? You can contact us at any time and we guarantee a response within 24 hours. Cambodia SEO works with you to generate business and not just traffic.

The post SEO Cambodia – Don’t Forget the Purpose of SEO appeared first on Cambodia SEO.

A markup language basically tells your browser and the search engines how you want your content to look. Without it every web page would just be a jumble of text. No paragraph breaks, no bold, no italics, nothing. Just endless reams of text.

The first part of developing a website involves defining the Meta Tags and that’s where we’re going to look today.

What are Meta Tags?

There are a whole bundle of different meta tags that are used in HTML the good news is that from your point of view, only four of these affect your onsite SEO.

The first is the title tag. This is the title of your web page as it is displayed in Google, if you’re using a CMS system like WordPress then this is automatically generated for you. If you’re not then you have to put this in by hand. If you don’t have a title, then Google has no real idea what your web page is about.

The next is the description tag. When you look at the Google results you’ll see that under most web page titles there’s a bit of text describing what that page is about. If you don’t complete the description then you won’t be telling your customers what your page is about, and they’re much less likely to click on the title and visit your site.

Then there’s the keywords tag. While Google is pretty good at scanning your text and working out what you’re talking about – it’s easy to be 100% certain that it knows what keywords you want to rank for, if you tell it. That’s what the keywords tag is for.

Finally there’s the robots tag. Sadly there are no robots for us in this but this allows you to tell Google which bits of your site to index and which bits to leave off the index. Setting this up properly means that you don’t need to submit each page of your site to search engines for ranking purposes.

In our next lessons we’ll look at how each of these tags works, and how you should do this work for each page in your site.

Of course if you’d prefer to leave that to the professionals we’d be pleased to do this for your website. Contact us at Cambodia SEO today and see how quickly you start climbing the rankings.

The post Onsite Cambodia SEO Lesson 1: Meta Tags appeared first on Cambodia SEO.

What’s the purpose of onsite SEO?

The first and foremost purpose of this kind of Search Engine Optimization is to ensure that the search engines can understand your website and the content that you serve.

After all if the search engines don’t know what you’re writing about there’s no way they can tell the world is there?

The second, and often neglected, reason for onsite SEO is to improve the overall user experience. It’s to ensure that your site is well designed and that each page of inter-linked content is easy to find from each other page.

In fact going back to an example from one of our earlier SEO lessons, Wikipedia, one of the things this website does better than any other on the internet today is link content together. Look at any detailed page on Wikipedia and you’ll see dozens of links to other useful pages and not just on Wikipedia itself but also in the outside world.

In this short series we’re going to examine each aspect of onsite (or sometimes onpage) SEO and how you can get the most our of your Search Engine Optimization.

In order to differentiate it from the rest of SEO we’ve created a new category for onsite SEO and it’s here you’ll find the remainder of this series.

Don’t forget that Cambodia SEO can do all the legwork for you, and because we’ve been doing this for clients all over the world it’s often easier and faster for us to do so. Contact us today for a free consultation to see how we can make your website a search engine winner.

The post What is onsite SEO? A quick guide from Cambodia SEO appeared first on Cambodia SEO.

You see the keyword data that’s useful for SEO is also useful for another form of marketing, SEM (search engine marketing). The world leader in SEM provision is… Google. Perhaps unsurprisingly given that Google is the world’s number one search engine (in the English speaking world) with 7 out of every 10 searches conducted through their search engine.

Search Engine Marketing?

There are two ways to get to the top of Google’s search results. The first is to use SEO to land in the top of the “organic results”, the second is to buy your way to the top. That’s SEM the adverts displayed at the top of the first (and possibly more pages) page of results and the adverts on the right hand side are paid for.

These adverts just like your cleverly SEO’d pages are targeted at keywords. In order for people to know which keywords to buy, Google has to give out a little data. That data is just as useful for SEO as it is for SEM.

So where do I get this data for my Cambodia SEO?

The Google Adwords Keyword tool is where ( https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool ). This nifty tool allows you break down a keyword very effectively. If you don’t have an Adwords account you’ll have to fill in one of those annoying little captchas to get the data, but that’s all the data you need to share.

Once you’ve input your data then adwords gives you a couple of pieces of vital information. Firstly, it tells you how many searches a month there are for that keyword. So if that number is 0 or thereabout – no-one is looking for that information. Secondly it tells you the level of competition for that keyword – shown as a number between 0 and 1. The closer the number is to 1, the more effort (theoretically) you’ll have to put in to get to the top of the search rankings.

You also get a list of associated keywords, some extremely relevant and others not so much. It’s worth scanning this list for a couple of reasons. Firstly, you might just find a better keyword – one with more hits and less competition. Secondly, it should generate ideas for other keywords.

Our strategy is always to optimize a keyword or a keyphrase at a time. You get to the top of the rankings for that phrase fastest that way. But once that’s done there may be other keywords which could add additional value to your business. So you can go back and re-optimize for those keywords too.

There are of course other tools for keyword analysis and Cambodia SEO has access to some of the best in the business. Why not call us today and let us take the headache out of your keyword research?

The post Cambodia SEO: On Keyword Research appeared first on Cambodia SEO.

Why does that matter?

It is absolutely true that an ESL speaker can get your site well ranked for a keyword or keyphrase. That’s because the search engines don’t read what people write, they only scan for words and phrases.

In fact one of the most common “black hat” search engine ranking schemes is to pay content mills in developing nations like India to churn out hundreds of uninformative articles that contain the same key phrase over and over again. It’s common because it works.

Why is that a problem?

I know, it’s certainly cheaper than paying for real content. Real content costs money because it’s accurate, it’s informative and hopefully (at least some of the time) it’s engaging.

It’s a problem because Search Engine Optimization is only half the battle. The second and equally important part of the battle is getting customers to stick around and read your content. Do you think it’s likely that people are going to want to wade through reams of badly written copy to “discover” how amazing your business is? Or is it more likely that they’ll click out of your site and move on to one they can understand easily?

There’s absolutely no point in having your site rank in the top position on Google if everyone who reads content associated with the site switches off. That’s why English is important. If your content is in English it needs to be content people will read.

The same is true for other languages. If you want your copy to appeal to Chinese visitors, or Thai visitors, or Japanese visitors, etc. then your website and web copy needs to work for those people. $2 translations won’t cut it. In the main, cheap translation bureaus copy and paste your text into Google translate (or Bing) and then copy and paste it back out.

These translations are garbage. The tools work excellently on a word-for-word basis, but they carry no sense of context or grammatical variances between languages. Literal translations can be offensive “I am hot” in English becomes “Je suis chaud” in French, which means “I’m sexually available” and not “I am hot” which is actually “J’ai Chaud” (literally; I have heat).

If you’re looking for search engine optimization in Cambodia, you need to invest in copy that doesn’t just bring visitors to your website but also keeps them there.

Cambodia SEO would be happy to talk to you about ways your copy can work more effectively for you. We also offer translation services for content into Khmer, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Chinese (Traditional and Simple), Malay, and various Indian languages. We have access to translators for almost any other European or American language too.

The post English and Search Engine Optimization in Cambodia – Why it Matters appeared first on Cambodia SEO.

Within about two weeks of the launch of this blog post when you type; “golden elephants kissing blue aardvarks” into a search engine this will be the number one ranked post.

If you’re asking yourself; “So what? Does anyone ever search for golden elephants kissing blue aardvarks anyway?” You’re asking the right question.

Cambodia SEO: Keyword Relevance

As this post should demonstrate, it’s easy to get a top ranking in Google or any other search engine for that matter. Why? Because if you use keywords that aren’t relevant – there’s absolutely no competition for them.

In the last year not one single soul has searched for “golden elephants kissing blue aardvarks”. There’s not a single article online with that exact keyphrase in it. So it’s not hard to be the top ranked for the phrase. Write an article. Wait for the search engines to do their indexing of your website and hey presto! You’re number one.

Businesses get caught by this everyday. We’ve lost count of the number of proud website owners we’ve met who excitedly tell us; “We’re number one for our keywords in all the search engines!”

For example; recently we’ve been looking at businesses in Siem Reap for some local clients. One of our clients is top rated in Google, Bing and Yahoo! and pretty much every other search engine you can think of. Their keyphrase makes absolute sense for their business, it’s something we’d have examined when building their site too. The only problem is that while it makes sense to us and it makes sense to them, it doesn’t make any sense to people using search engines. They don’t search for it and thus they don’t find his business. We’ve been working with that client to change one word in the phrase, and that small change will start to target a keyphrase that over 7 million people a year look for. It’s a big difference right?

The lesson here is that anyone can find themselves working on “golden elephants kissing blue aardvarks” and anyone can find their website precisely 0% better off afterwards. Choosing keywords isn’t just about choosing keywords that are relevant to your business, it’s also about choosing keywords that people actually search for.

Cambodia SEO are experts in keyword research, use the contact us page to send us an e-mail so we can talk you through how we’d help your business avoid the elephants and aardvarks trap.

The post Golden Elephants Kissing Blue Aardvarks: Cambodia SEO on Keywords appeared first on Cambodia SEO.

Cambodia SEO: What is a Keyword?

A keyword is simply a word that people type into a search engine to find information. A keyphrase is a collection of words that do the same job.

So for example, let’s say you were thinking about taking a holiday in Siem Reap but you want to know a little bit more about the place before you come. What would you type into Google to do your research?

Many people will start by just Googling; “Siem Reap.” It’s not a bad place to start is it? The trouble is that for hoteliers, bar owners, club owners, restaurant owners, etc. it’s not a very useful phrase. You might be thinking of taking a holiday in Siem Reap, equally you might be doing some research for a school project. If you type the phrase into Google it’s also not very useful to you, there’s a mish-mash of pages delivered on the first page from Wikipedia and Wiki Travel to Tripadvisor and Visit Mekong. In fact there are over 21 million pages returned for “Siem Reap”.

So once you’ve read the blurb on the Wiki pages and decided that Siem Reap’s your chosen holiday destination, you’ll probably start narrowing things down a little.

“Flights to Siem Reap” or “Travel to Siem Reap” followed by “Hotels in Siem Reap” or “Guesthouses in Siem Reap” are likely to be your next stop. These keyphrases are much more interesting to business owners than “Siem Reap”. Firstly, they are whole heck of a lot more specific about what it is you want. Secondly, they contain a buying signal don’t they?

This is what SEO is really about. Identifying those useful keywords and keyphrases that might bring not just traffic to your website, but actual business conversion online too.

Cambodia SEO can help you conduct your keyword research, please contact us today via e-mail and request a free consultation to help get you started.

The post Cambodia SEO: On Keywords and Keyphrases appeared first on Cambodia SEO.

Cambodia SEO: Design Vs. Content

There’s no doubt at all that a well-designed eye-catching site is a lovely thing. There’s strong evidence to suggest that a site that’s easy to navigate and simple to use is one that people enjoy interacting with. If they find your web page visually appealing so much the better.

However, design isn’t what brings people to your website in the first place. That’s content. The more content you have and the better quality that content is the more people will be able to find your site in the first place.

If you’d like a real life example; think about Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn’t the best of sites from a visual perspective. There are no flash graphics, no fancy menus, and the text is all ordinary too. Yet, it’s one of the most popular sites on earth. That’s all down to content. Wikipedia’s users generate more content and maintain more content than almost any site on earth.

The thing is, people don’t use the Internet for exploring wondrously beautiful sites in the main. They use it to find information. Wikipedia has lots of that and thus it gets search engine priority. It’s a rare search for data that doesn’t return a Wiki page in the top ten results on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, etc.

We aren’t going to dwell too much on design in this blog but there are a few key factors you should be aware of when having a site built:

1. Navigation should be simple, no content should be more than 3 clicks away from the landing page

2. It should be easy to add content, the search engines prefer fresh content and it’s essential to update a site once every couple of months

3. The design should maximize the SEO benefits of your content that means your designers need to consider what’s going on the pages and not just the look of the pages

4. It should be fast loading, there are serious search benefits for quick loading sites

As we move forward with this series, the next thing we’re going to look at is onsite SEO. It’s here we’ll start to show you the ways you can maximize the search engine rankings from your content. A lot of this part of the series is relevant to your web design. We’re not going to give you advice on the look of your site but rather how to get every benefit from the site itself before we move on to offsite SEO.

Cambodia SEO is happy to offer a telephone consultation regarding your onsite SEO. Use the contact us page to send an e-mail and we’ll get straight back to you.

The post Cambodia SEO: Design vs. Content appeared first on Cambodia SEO.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization. Here at Cambodia SEO we don’t believe it’s a complicated task to get a site to rank well on Google. We know that sometimes it can be a long, slow process but the process is always the same.

You fix the elements of your website that enable you to rank for certain keywords and then you get out on the world wide web to create an interaction between your website and the rest of the world. That’s it. No magic involved.

So why do we need Cambodia SEO? Remember that we said it can be a long slow process? Well we can help you get to the shortest possible route to ethical rankings. That means the work that we do not only gets you to the top of Google, it keeps you there.

All our work is “white hat” and that means it’s the kind of SEO that Google likes. We don’t cheat, we want our clients to be completely unaffected by changes in algorithms and other technical stuff from the search engines.

To prove that we have no secrets, over the coming months we’ll be blogging about what exactly it is that we do and how you could do it yourself if you wanted. Of course, we expect you’d prefer we did it for you but it really is up to you.

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