What is hCard microformat? According to microformats.org, hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426) properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML.

It is basically a formatted display of your contact information using vCard properties in your website.

Why should I use hCard? It is simply because many local search engines are now starting to use hCard formatted data as local signals. Yahoo! Local has supported hCard since June 2006; Google Map has supported hCard since July 2007; Technorati Kitchen is now pinging microformats. So, there are great avenues to expose your website to the local people.

How can I use hCard?

1. Understand about hCard and its format.
2. Create your own hCard using this FREE hCard generator.
3. Embed the hCard code into your web page. (Most likely in your contact page).
4. Submit your page to pingerati.

So, that’s it! Though it is tedious to include these microformats, applying this practice when building your website will give you a heads-up in local search engines as well as in other search engine applications (including Yahoo! Search Monkey).

Pay-per-click (PPC) is one of the most important web marketing tools to boost your website conversion. Since PPC involves money, it is crucial that you plan your PPC campaign carefully.

Following are few tips in planning your PPC campaign:

1. Decide on keywords

When selecting keywords, it is important that you use keywords that your potential customers will search for. You can start by going through the list of keywords that you have developed in the beginning of this SEO tutorial (5 Steps to Define Keywords).

Refine your keywords to use specific terms instead of general terms. For instance, the keyword “night light” can be made more specific into “hand-crafted night light”. Limit your keywords up to 3-4 words. Not many people are likely to type in more than 4 words to search for something.

2. Do a PPC research on the keywords

Do a research on these keywords on the PPC search engines (such as Yahoo!, Google, and MSN AdCenter). Find out the competition level, the number of searches done on these keywords, and the bidding cost for each keyword. Evaluate all of these factors to select the keywords for your campaign. Ideally, you want to choose keywords that have low competition level, high number of searches, and low bidding cost. Balance out these 3 factors when selecting your keywords.

More specific keywords present a better opportunity because of its low competition level, moderate number of searches, and low bidding cost.

3. Setup a budget

Using your research data, create a budget for your PPC campaign. How much you are willing to spend on your PPC campaign? Use this budget to establish your maximum budget and maximum bid for your keywords.

4. Prepare your PPC campaign plan

Once you have prepared all your keywords and your budget, prepare your PPC campaign plan.

Write your text ads for each of your keywords. When writing your text ads, make sure to make a compelling statement, insert your keywords, and relate them to your landing pages. Your text ads are like bridges for your potential customers to visit your landing pages.

Create landing pages for your keywords. Make sure that your landing pages are effective enough to convert your click-through users into clients. It is pointless to have a high click-through but low conversion because of poor landing pages. Copyblogger.com has an elaborate tutorial on how to develop killer landing pages.

5. Execute your PPC strategy

Do a final review on your PPC strategy. Make sure that you are selecting the right keywords. Ensure that each of your text ads will capture the search audiences and bring them into your landing pages. Review your landing pages so that they are compelling enough to convert your click-through audiences.

Finally, do NOT forget to turn on your website analytics and setup your analytic goals to keep track of your conversion rates on each keyword.

Once you have done all of these, start running your PPC campaign.

6. Monitor. Monitor. And, improve.

Like other SEO strategies, PPC requires constant monitoring. Do a regular monitoring. If you have just started your PPC campaign, do a close regular monitoring (say, hourly). Once your PPC campaign has matured, you can reduce your monitoring frequency.

When you are monitoring your PPC, please take note of irregular behaviors on your keywords. These include high number of click-through with low conversion, budget is maxed out in just a few days, and no impressions or click-through happening. Take appropriate actions to correct these irregular behaviors.

On the other hand, you should also monitor the success of your PPC as well. Keep track on keywords and landing pages that have high conversion rate. Use these as learning examples to understand your audience and create effective keywords and landing pages.

Use these data to find ways to improve your PPC such as rewriting your text ads, reselecting your keywords, adding new keywords, and so on. When your PPC campaign has matured, do not be satisfied with the results that you are having. Continue to make improvements to your PPC campaign. If you find that PPC proves to be a highly successful web marketing tool for you, you might need to consider increasing your budget for PPC.

While it involves cost, PPC can be a powerful marketing tool for your business when planned and executed wisely.

After focusing on your basic site optimization, it is time for you to improve your SEO linking system (i.e. internal links as well as external links).

Two factors that you need to consider in link building:
1. Your internal documents links.
Use the back-link technique (type link:[your url] in Google) to discover the sites that are linking to you. After you have listed all of these, then assess each of these links in terms of:
- whether the sites linking to you have the same market or neighboring market as your product / service.
- do these sites speak about what my site is offering?
- is the link working? is the linked page up-to-date?
- is it linked to your landing page?
Take note of these and ponder on how you can improve the content of your internal documents.
2. External sites linking to your site.
How do you get other sites to link to your site?
- Submit into web directories such as dmoz.org, Yahoo! directory, and many others.
- Ask your friends, business partners, or colleagues if they can help to link their websites to your site.
- Use press releases.
- Exchange links with reliable websites or websites that have different but related interests to your products / services.

It has never been easy to build external links that link to your website. However, if you put your effort to make these things happen, the results will be quite pay-off in the future.

To-do List:
1. Evaluate the current external links that link to your website.
2. Improve the content on your linked documents.
3. Start to expand your external links that link to your website.

After all the planning that you have done for your SEO, it is time to take these things into action.

As proposed by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin in Search Engine Optimization (an hour a day), there are 4 tasks that you need to do for a basic site optimization:

1. Page Titles. Some of the tips are:
- Keep it short (around 40-60 characters).
- Include your keywords and your name / company name.
- Write unique titles for each page.

2. Meta Tags. There are two particular tags to focus in: description and keywords. Tips for each:
Description:
- Keep it informative and eye-catching.
- Pair it up with your page title.
- Include your keywords whenever possible.
Keywords:
- Use keywords that you have listed that are relevant to the page.
- Add company name and your location in the keywords.

3. Robot Walk-through. Have your pages been indexed successfully by search engine robots? If not, the following are some of the reasons:
1. Robots cannot follow your links (maybe because they are in JavaScript).
2. Your landing pages are stand-alone (no other pages are connecting to it).
3. Server outage. It is possible that when the robot tried to visit your site, it was down.
4. Site is too big. Robots do not index all your pages. Keep your landing pages with a maximum of 2 clicks away.
5. Robots were asked to stay away. If you have meta name “robots” and it is set to “noindex” or “nofollow”, then it is most likely that the robots do not visit the page.
6. Site is penalized. Your site has violated the search engine guidelines. Thus, robots are banned from indexing your website.

4. Site Text. Search through the body text of your pages. Perform the following if possible for each page:
- swap out certain words with your keywords.
- swap out images containing your keywords with a background image with floating text.
- swap out all general keywords terms with your specific keywords.
- include keywords in links whenever possible.
- add keyword-rich captions into photos.
- add keyword-rich tagline at the bottom of the page.
- add keywords to the page header.

So, for to-do list:
1. Change your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords, and body texts so that they are optimized with your keywords.

Words of cautions:
1. Please do not overdo it. Overwhelming the robots with keywords will not work. Remember to make sure your site is also readable to your REAL users. It is pointless to have a site that is NOT readable by your users.
2. Remember to always keep it short and informative. Robots will not index all your texts and keywords.

It is pointless to do SEO without actually monitoring if it is working well or not. What are the factors that you should monitor?

In our personal opinions, there are at least 4 factors that you should consider evaluating your SEO performance on:
1. Ranks - where does your page shows up in the search engine result pages (SERPs)? Not many users will search more than the first page. Therefore, your goal is to increase your page rank in the SERPs to be in the top 10 results whenever possible. Record your current page rank (if it is found in more than 3 pages, just record it as ‘None’).
2. Conversions - how many people are visiting your site daily? Out of these number of people, how many actually visit your product / service page or how many eventually buy your product / hire your service? It is important for you to keep track on this as this shows if your SEO is bringing the right traffic that generate sales.
You can use the FREE Google Analytics.
3. Indexed Pages - check how many pages of your site have been indexed by the search engines. You can simply type in your URL or unique terms such as: chazown web “Your vision. We make it into reality.” into the search engine boxes. Having an understanding of how many pages have been indexed helps you to understand if your site has been visited by the search engine bots or if your landing pages have been indexed completely.
4. Inbound links - check the number of external pages who link to your site. Inbound links play a major part in determining your ranking position in the SERPs. You can check the number of inbound links of your web page by entering the following query in the search engine query box:

link:http://www.yoursiteaddress.com/

There are other factors not mentioned here that you can monitor as well. Please refer to the SEOMoz’s Article on Search Engine Ranking Factors.

So, to-do list for the day:
1. Record your current site’s ranking, conversion, indexed pages, and inbound links.
2. Set up goals for each of these factors. For example, there will be an increase of 30% conversion from regular users to customers (users who have purchased your products) in 3 months.

So, how to select keywords? The steps are:
1. Brainstorm all your keywords - use Excel or other softwares to list all the keywords that come into your mind. Do not worry about refining, we will do this later. Some things to think about are: what are your products / services? where are you located? do you offer seasonal products?
2. Increase the number of your keywords by involving other parties - ask your organizational team members, your customers, friends and neighbors, or even your competitors’ websites. Another idea is to steal related terms from search engines (e.g. ask.com).
3. Calculate the competitiveness of your keywords. Use wordtracker, overture keyword, keyword discovery (fee-based), and google adwords.
4. Evaluate the competitiveness of your keywords and record them. In each keyword, use the above tools to consider your keywords:
(i) search popularity - is your keyword popular? The more popular it is, the more people are searching for it.
(ii). relevance - is your keyword relevance to what your website is giving? Consult your other team members in regards of the relevancy.
(iii). competition level - are there many websites that use this keyword? You can based your keyword competition level by searching through Google and see how many pages it returns.
5. Shorten the list of keywords. Now, it is time to shorten your keywords. Keywords that are higher in popularity, higher in relevancy, and lower in competition level are keywords that you want to choose. As you select these keywords, always remember to think through if the keyword connects well with your site.

Though these are just 5 steps, each step will take a certain amount of time to accomplish. It is better to plan well than to fail later on.

So, to-do list:
1. Create an excel file to store all your keywords record.
2. Brainstorm and expand your keywords and record them into your excel file.
3. Compute each keyword based on popularity, relevancy, and competition level. Record them in your excel file.
4. Shorten your list by evaluating the above factors. (HIGH populary, HIGH relevancy, LOW competition level = BETTER keywords)

The above tasks should occupy you for around 1 week. So, have fun and all the best! :)

Defining keywords might not be as easy as it sounds. Many people often have the tendency to define keywords too quickly without thinking them through.

There are many factors that you need to think in defining keywords:
1. Business goals - understanding your business goals will help you define your keywords better.
2. Target audience / market - research on your target audience; this helps to know what keywords they often use to associate with your products.
3. Your type of organization - each type of organization (small or large organizations, B2B or B2C, etc) has its own advantages and challenges in defining keywords. Knowing the type of your organization helps to define the plan of attacks for your SEO.
4. Get your organizational team together - you need to involve your marketing, sales, IT, graphic designers, writers, etc in defining keywords. Each of them has different perspectives. Marketing and sales people might know the latest jargons used related to your products.

Considering the above factors help you to effectively define keywords that are relevant.

So, to do list for the day:
1. Understand or review the factors that contribute to keyword definition.

SEO requires a lot of hard work and time. Therefore, it is important to evaluate your website if it actually needs SEO. You do NOT want to spend a lot of time on something which is not needed, right? :)

5 reasons you might not need SEO:
1. Your website is not for public domain but for your internal group.
For instance, an administration tool for your employees or internal blog. You can tell all the bots not to index your site by inserting the following code into your tags:
< META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" >

2. You have other aspects that you need to prioritize in your business.
If you have other aspects that you need to prioritize in order for your business to run, do those first. SEO takes a lot of time and effort and does not guarantee an immediate return on investment.

3. Your website is ranking very well in the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages) and has been given you enough traffic to generate your targeted sales.
If you have this, then congratulation! Dramatically, change your website might impact your ranking on SERPS. However, you need to monitor your site regularly to ensure that it stays well in the SERPS.

4. You are planning to redesign your whole website soon.
It is better not to work on SEO if you plan to overhaul your website with a new look and content. What you can do is to create a plan of attack (discussed later on) on how you want to perform SEO on your new site.

5. There are better and effective methods (other than SEO) to increase your sales.
If traditional marketing works better for you, it is better to focus on improving these methods than to spend extra bucks and efforts on SEO. For instance, if your market is in developing countries where Internet is not prominently used, then using SEO will not be worthwhile.

So, points to ponder:
1. Evaluate your business model and website. Based on the 5 reasons above, do you really need an SEO?
2. If so, are you prepared to spend a lot of effort (OR) money on SEO?

SEOmoz.org has published Search Engine Ranking Factors V.2.

This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google’s ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results).

In reviewing each factor and looking through the standard deviation and mean weights for each factor, the following are the 5 factors that many agreed to play important parts in search engine optimization:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
The keywords you use in the title tag speaks BIG to what your site is all about.

2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
Inbound links to your site from other external sites will certainly contribute to your search engine ranking. On top of that, the texts that these external sites use to link to your sites will tell what your site is all about.

3. Global Link Popularity of Site
While this is controversial, many seem to put this factor as highly importance. The more better / great sites linking to your site, the better your website will show in the search engine results.

4. Age of Site
It is not about when you have purchased the domain of your site but it is about when did your site get indexed by Google the first time. Like wine, the older the better is your site.

5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
This refers to the number of internal links pointing to the target page. More internal links pointing to the target page, the higher the importance the target page is.

Many more factors are still listed in the document. Therefore, it is a good idea to often evaluate your website.

Remember to always check the keywords that you want your site to relate to. Evaluate the importance of these keywords and grade them based on the factors stated in the document.

Hubspot, a well-known internet marketing consultant, has created a robust tool that will grade your website on the basis of SEO. Besides basing all the grades on on-page and off-page SEOs (such as headings, meta datas, image alt, and others), the tool also provides report based on blogs and social mediaspheres which definitely play a very important part in today’s Internet market.

To top that of, the report allows you to compare how your website ranks with your other competitors.

So enough of my babbling, we would like to present to you: Website Grader - an SEO tool by Hubspot.