Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization
Author: Karen Michelle Gatdula

So now you have your corporate blog. You spent a lot of money for professional marketers to choose the right words and captions and the most appealing tag lines for your product, for copywriters to check if there are grammatical errors and enhance the content of your campaign and for web designers to create the most attractive design ever made since the dawned of the Internet fad.

You're all set now, or not.

You are very excited you want to see what your blog looks like but you accidentally (accidents happen everyday and this is a worst case scenario) forgot the url of your blog so you googled the generic and blasted – you never find your blog. Well, it's not that the blog doesn't exist but there are millions and I mean MILLIONS of blogs being born everyday just like the one that you spawned. But no need to dilate those eyes and calm down a little bit because the solution to your problem is just as easy as 1, 2, 3.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization can do the most amazing thing in the Internet today. They can make your website hit the top 1 spot on Google, Yahoo, MSN or whatever search engine you desire. This is being done by professional SEO Webmasters in which several Offshoring companies has the most talented and experienced people in the whole wide world to do the trick for you. Addendum to that, a Philippines outsourcing company like iStaff.ph. offers the lowest labor cost of link builders and SEO specialists you could get from anywhere in the planet.

Outsourcing: In The Philippines Perspective

Outsourcing: In The Philippines Perspective
Author: Karen Michelle Gatdula

Outsourcing is often given a negative connotation since it was said that this industry will somehow cause a massive unemployment to the western countries. I extremely beg to differ.

Outsourcing is like the rich dad poor dad principle – on one hand, the poor dad would tell his son to study hard and after he graduates, he should find a good job in a good company while on the other hand the rich dad would tell his son to study hard and after he graduates he should start his own company.

Outsourcing is the transcendence of the western people from being employees to being employers.

For the Philippines, the country's progress growth drastically increased after the BPO industry dawned and continue to boom year after year. The quality of living that Filipinos who work for a BPO company improved into a greater degree. The demand for property leasing also multiplied thus giving many job opportunities to undereducated Filipinos as construction workers.

But the most important thing that Outsourcing does to everyone of us is providing us the knowledge of different cultures and diverse people thus giving us new solutions to the world's increasing demand on low-cost labors.

Nofollow and Noindex on Robots.txt and Meta Tags

Nofollow and Noindex on Robots.txt and Meta Tags
Author: Eileen Maravillas

I know a lot of you are wondering what's the difference between the “nofollow” and “noindex” in the robots.txt file and the ones declared on the meta tags. Some search engine optimization specialists claims that there's no difference while others believe that one method is less valuable than the other.

You can ask it out on several webmaster/SEO forums, but you'll just get mixed responses. In here, I will give you the REAL answer! According to Eric Enge's interview with Google's software engineer Matt Cutts way back in 2007, there are differences in using NoIndex, NoFollow, and Robots.txt.

In The Robots.txt File

Even if you restrict Google's spider from indexing certain pages of your website, they can still accumulate page rank. For example, if you disallow the crawling of your “About Us” page yet your homepage links to it, PR juice is still passed on.

In addition, websites that disallow crawling can still accumulate page rank and be visible in search results. Why? If another website links to it, PR juice will be passed on. Google can sometimes use the information of a website submitted to ODP (also known as DMOZ) in order to display it on their results page, or when another website links to it.

In The Meta Tag

Let's understand what Nofollow and Noindex really means.

The Nofollow is usually used on outgoing links, when declared in the meta tag, it means “do not follow all links on this page.” With this, you are also telling the spider not to pass PR juice. However, the nofollow on the meta tag also applies to your links that points to the other pages of your website. This also means that you are depriving the flow of PR juice to some of your pages.

On the other hand, the Noindex means, “do not index this page.” Pages with noindex can still accumulate page rank if a there's a dofollow link pointing to that page.

Dofollow is the opposite of Nofollow - a link with no “nofollow” attribute assigned means it's a dofollow link. A term used by webmasters and SEO experts.

To sum it all up:

• NoFollow means you're telling the search engine spider not to follow a link and also not to pass PR juice to that link.
• NoIndex means you're telling the search engine spider not to index your website and not to show it on SERP.
• The website or webpage in a Nofollow link can still gain PR if another site links to it without the nofollow attribute.
• Pages with the Noindex tag can still gain PR if another site links to it without a nofollow attribute.
• Pages with the Noindex tag can still be visible on SEPR using the information collected from ODP (DMOZ) or when another website links to it using Dofollow.
  
• Nofollow on the meta tag of a webpage, applies to all the links on that page.
• Nofollow attribute on any link applies only to that link.

So whether you use the Robots.txt or the Meta Tag, the results are still the same. The reason why Robots.txt is mostly used is because “it is the fundamental method of putting up an electronic no trespassing sign that people have used since 1996,” and it's much easier to declare which pages of your website not to crawl instead of placing the NoIndex code manually on individual pages' meta tags.

Commonly, SEO services do provide complete analysis of a website as well as recommendations. So whenever you are looking for a good search engine optimization service, never forget to ask for a website analysis first, don't just jump in and hire somebody you do not know.