SEM Consultant

Being able to view AdWords ads that are targeting specific countries can be very useful. Whether you’re an AdSense publisher looking for less-competitive keywords to target or an SEM consultant managing a localized AdWords campaign of a client, you would need to learn how to do this.

Although you could always go to the Google Adwords Preview tool, there is a much easier way to do this.

1. Do your search for the keyword you want on google.
2. When the results appear, click on your browser’s address bar and just add &gl=us at the end of the URL string if you want to see US geo-targeted AdWords ads.
3. Press enter.

You can of course replace the country code with a different country other than the US if that is what you need. Try it out and tell me if it works!

After having lived in Raya Gardens for a few months, we’ve decided that it’s not what we want. I guess it’s father time having an effect on me for living in a nice condominium such as Raya Gardens just seemed to have lost its appeal to me. The place looks great but I guess I’ve “matured” enough to want a simpler life.

That’s why we have acquired a new place at a really nice place just outside of Metro Manila but not too far for it to be inconvenient to be driving to and from Makati where we work.

Below are some pictures of our new place. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful La Marea in San Pedro, Laguna is. All our friends who’ve been there couldn’t help but truly love the place.

He’s probably one of the most controversial Filipinos in recent memory. He’s had plenty of mud thrown his way courtesy of the mainstream media. These are done mostly by other prominent business and political personalities that Mark Jimenez collided with, to tarnish his reputation. To make things worse, Mark Jimenez is a very reclusive man. You don’t see him grandstanding on the evening news like most politicians these days. So all the inaccurate information about him that is being pumped into the mainstream media is just about all that Filipinos both here and abroad know about Mark Jimenez.
They don’t know that Mark Jimenez is the largest single benefactor of the Catholic church. Or that his Hulog ng Langit Foundation was one of the first to come to the aid of the Wowowee Ultra stampede incident. Mark Jimenez has also done other things to directly help the Filipino people such as giving tens of millions of pesos to the
parents of students who lost their money and could not enroll in school because of that College Assurance Plan fiasco.

One more thing I noticed about him when I met the man is that he loves to talk… well… more like teach. And if there’s someone who is worth your time listening to, he’s probably it.

Mark Jimenez is a self-made man and his achievements are truly world-class. With all the things he has achieved though, Mark MJ Jimenez remains the most down-to-earth person I have ever come across. Do you know that during Bill Clinton’s reign as US President, Mark Jimenez was one of his closest advisers? MJ is the very first Filipino to ever spend a night in the White House. If I remember it right, he was somewhat in-charge of the United States’ Latin American affairs.

Mario Crespo or Mark MJ Jimenez as he is more popularly known, is also hands down the most brilliant man I personally know and also the most misunderstood. His understanding of the real root cause of the Philippines’ struggles as both a nation and people, I believe is one of the sharpest and least pretentious.

He’s got a lot to say about why things are the way they are and why we (Filipinos) are the way we are right now. Most importantly, I firmly believe that he has the answers… Coming from someone as objective thinking as myself, that’s something as I don’t get impressed easy!

I remember when I first got into search engine optimization back in 2000. So many SEO people then were busy trying to discover that elusive SEO magic bullet that would take their website to the top of search engine rankings. I’ve seen and personally tried some of them with varying success. I’ve successfully taken some of my early websites to top search engine rankings using some of these old SEO magic bullets. I’ve also gotten a few websites banned on any and all of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live) for the tricks I’ve used before.

To be perfectly honest, I wish that SEO is more complicated and difficult than it really is. At least, I could more easily justify the cost of my SEO services. The truth is, much like what I said in my short presentation at the SEMCON held at the Intercon Hotel in Makati last month, there really are just 2 key elements of a successful SEO campaign: Content and Links.
It doesn’t matter what the latest search engine algorithm is. For as long as you have properly leveraged these 2 key elements of your SEO campaign, I firmly believe that you would be able to achieve top rankings across all the major search engines and maintain that top ranking. The time that it would take to achieve success can of course vary as other elements come to play but it’s really just a matter of time before you find your website on the first page of all the major search engines for the keywords that you are targeting. Make no mistake about it. Content + Links = Top Search Engine Rankings.

Content Is King

Content on Your Website

This old cliché still holds true to this day. I firmly believe that no matter what new algorithm Google or any of the other major search engines come up with, content would still play a central role in how they rank a particular webpage. Florida? Bourbon? LSI? Bring it on! For as long as your website has content that is highly relevant to the keywords being typed in by users, it would always be on top of the results. My own website’s first page rankings for over 200 “SEO” and “SEM” related keywords, is a solid testament to the power of content.

To this day, content is still largely defined as “text” but search engines are already starting to include “other forms of content” into the search results. More and more maps, images and even videos are appearing in search results. As search engine algorithms evolve and become capable of indexing and ranking more types of content and the Meta data embedded to describe these other types of content, the SEO landscape would somewhat change but content as being a core factor of SEO would remain constant.

Content on Other Websites You Are Associated With

The next thing that you need to consider about content is the content found on other websites. Surely there are other web sites on the Internet about widgets and/or other semantically related topics. What you need to do is to find as many of these web sites as possible and to categorize them as either competition or non-competition (i.e. the Blue Widgets Association of America). Don’t worry about what you would be doing with these web sites just yet. We’ll discuss about how these websites would interplay later on.

Links

Links On Your Website

You can leverage as many of your other web pages to push the web page you have optimized for the keyword “blue widgets”. Simply mentioning your target keyword on your other pages and using that instance of your keyword to link to your “blue widgets” page would tell the search engines to prioritize your blue widgets page for the keyword “blue widgets”.
So for example, if you have a page about blue widgets, make sure that you link to it from as many of your other pages using the phrase “blue widgets” as anchor text. This would make the search engines know that your page about blue widgets is the most relevant page on your website for the phrase “blue widgets”.

Links From Other Web Sites To Yours

A link to and from your website constitutes an association between the two. How that association is defined would depend on the content of the 2 pages that contain the links. The actual text (a text link is ideal although an image link using the ALT attribute would also do.) used as the anchor text to link to the other website also plays a big part.
It also doesn’t hurt to have at least 1 outbound link to another web page on another website that is semantically related to your target keyword of “blue widgets”. Just make sure that the web site that you link to is not your competition.

Basically, if you have web site about widgets and in it, you have optimized a web page about blue widgets and you have enough (the actual number is relative to the keywords being targeted so I can’t give an actual number) links from other widgets related websites on pages about widgets (and other semantically related topics) and those pages that link to your blue widgets page use the phrase “blue widgets” or other semantically related keywords as the anchor text of the link to your blue widgets page, very soon, you would find your web page about blue widgets on top of search results for guess what keyword?… blue widgets!

Well, I migrated to a new web server and wasn’t able to recover the old posts from my original blog. I didn’t really put in that much effort to it anyway. I think my original blog didn’t have enough importance and contained very little informative posts in it so I said goodbye to it altogether.

This time, I promise to write more important stuff that more people can make use of and benefit from. So here we go folks!