Two days ago, we've started optimizing www.hairphil.com, a hair restoration clinic in Manila. Some of the corrections we immediately implemented are:

1. Meta elements corrections.
Although the original developer used the meta elements to hype the keywords, he however overdid it by putting more than 200 characters Meta Title. Suggested title length is more 80 to 100 characters. Meta title more than 200 characters is already considered SE spamming.

2. Code Correction based on W3C standards
The original code has 47 errors and 9 warnings. www.hairphil.com home page is now clean from errors. Proper use of standards and best practices makes sure that not only is the copy marked up in a semantic fashion which search engines can interpret and weigh without confusion, it also skews the content-to-code ratio in the direction where it needs to be while forcing all of the information in the page to be made accessible, thus favoring the content.

3. PageRank
The site has a poor PageRank at PR0. We have built relevant links pointing to the site from high PR websites related to hair treatment and hair transplant services and we're expecting PR0 to PR1 increase once all the new links have been crawled.

4. .htaccess optimization
Google has yet to clean up the inherent problem that arises when the www version of your site gets indexed along with the non-www version. This distributes the root page's PR and is detrimental in the site's PageRank.

In the next few days, we'll be restructuring the site to be able to put relevant and informative contents in the home page in order to increase Code-to-Text ratio, optimize internal links using NO FOLLOW tags, and rewrite articles to improve keyword density and positioning. Read more!

1. Your Business is Open 24/7, 365 Days a Year
Not just in your locality but take note, TO THE WHOLE WORLD! Unlike your business' physical office that may be open from 8am to 5pm, Monday to Friday, your business' website is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year. This is specially useful if your business is operating on a different timezones or if you have potential clients worldwide.

2. It's Your Online Catalog / Brochure / Product Manual That Can Be Changed at Anytime
A website is much easier and cheaper to update than print materials. A website can have almost limitless feature in terms of modifying contents and information. This is very cost efficient in such a way that you can easily change information anytime without having to worry about distributing them.

3. Extend your market reach Globally
Once your business have a website, you aren't that local small business anymore. Your business is now visible to potential clients across the country and across the globe. Internet, without a doubt, is the most effective way to trade internationally.


4. Present a Professional Image
If you are a small or start-up business, a professionally designed website is a great way of making your business look bigger than it actually is. Nowadays, customers assume that you already have a website. In fact, your top competitors probably have a website.

5. Improved Customer Service
You make it easy for your clients to answer common questions about your business by publishing a Frequently Asked Questions. Many business website nowadays have the feature to request quotation, fill-up an application form, download invoices and other important documents such as product specification and activity reports.

6. Promote Your Services
Many customers nowadays refer to companies' websites when making major buying decisions. Even self-employed professionals such as lawyers, physicians, dentists, engineers, financial consultants or entertainers and many other service oriented business should let customers know that they have options.

7. Sell Your Products online
I know a many big online stores that enjoys the benefits of not having to pay huge office rent, electric bills and other costs that go along with running a business. Selling on the internet is much cheaper and is a good way go complement your offline selling strategies. Providing secure online ordering has become very affordable and can easily be set-up even for small businesses.

8. Gather Information and Generate Valuable Leads
Your clients' views and opinions counts a lot if you are to stay in business. By having online forms such as comment, poll and survey, you can gather information about your customers and potential customers. Instead of going out to get these valuable information, let them come to you by visiting your website and generate new leads from visitors who are potential clients.

9. Provides Instant Gratification to your Clients
Most people are so busy and don't enjoy waiting for information. A business website can give them what they want, when they want it. Clients use to ask for product specification, price lists or catalog and will have to wait 'til you fax it to them. But website makes it so easy for you to simply give your URL where they can see those eye-catching pages that says it all for your product.

10. Great Recruitment Tool
Many job applicants won't do walk-in application anymore without visiting the company's website to check out how they would fit in to the organization. By having a job posting page in your website, it becomes an instant recruitment tool. Both you and the applicant saves time because you can first screen the applicants
qualification before asking him to come to your office for an interview.
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In designing a website, we consider not only the site's visual appeal but a lot of other factors including accessibility, page size, code compatibility, SEO readiness, and most importantly the purpose of the website.

Here, I'm giving emphasis to the purpose of the website. As with anything that exist, without a purpose, existence is futile. There's no use in having the most eye-catching website in the world, if it doesn't do anything.

In the "Website Planner" we send to our clients, we ask you to tell us who your target market is, what your competitive advantage are and we request you to tell us which among the reasons below is close to your purpose of launching your website.

To gain a favorable impression of the company/organization
To sell products directly using credit card information (shopping cart)
To make available product information/price lists to distributors/customers
To strengthen brand identification
To develop a qualified list of prospects
Other (please specify)


Almost all of the websites we develop are business websites and we see it very important that we as the developer and you as our client have identified the purpose of your website and who we design it for.

So, who do we really make your website for? People are generally bewildered when we say, not for you nor for us but for your CLIENTS.

Except to some website clients who have really studied their clients demographic and psycographic or those clients with adept understand of marketing, many approach us with uncertain voice telling us, "I want to have a splash page with this or that" or "I think the website of this softdrinks company is cool, I want to have something similar to that".

Well, let me tell you a secret in marketing, nothing will jump start your business more than knowing your clients' needs. We develop your website for your CLIENTS not for you. Beyond your envy with other flash heavy website, text and news bombarded homepage, you must come to an understanding of what your client expect to see from your website.

If you are a small company offering PC repair service, your potential clients must be looking for pricing, response time, your service area and ongoing promo.

If you are a car rental company, prospects might be interested in checking your rental conditions, rental rates, car model and photos.

If you are a big Telecommunications company, clients maybe interested to check for new mobile phone packages and promo, information on how to configure a mobile phone for specific service and so on.

You'll see that depending on the nature of your business and the size of your organization, you'll have different reasons for having a website and these will be the primary considerations when designing your website.

While many website owners are tempted to brag about how good their products are or how big their company is, only the wise profit by realizing that clients wanted to know how they can benefit from the product you are selling.

So we suggest to our customers, to be client-centered or other-minded as opposed to clinging to product-centered, self-minded attitude. In order to illustrate this principle, take the following statements for example.

Instead of saying "Our product is cheapest in the market" we suggest to state that "You can get a 50% savings from our new product"

Instead of boasting "We have more than 200 employees", we can say "we have the capacity to deliver 100,000 boxes per week"

These simple change in pitch from bragging to marketing can invite visitors to click more pages of your website so they'd learn more about what's in it for them as oppose to leaving your website and starting a new search.

So before you start deciding what website package you get, learn to think as if you are the client of your own business and assess for yourself what you would like to see from your website. Read more!

Our client's point person called up 6pm today in a disquieted voice. She told me that their site was spammed. With our developer already out of the office, I immediately checked their website and found detestable entries in their testimonial page and here's the snapshot.



I quickly accessed the database and deleted those absurd entries which brings back the clean page and I had a sigh of relief. Here's how their cleaned up page looks like.




So, what do they do this for? The answer is Link Building! Link building is a by-product of Page Rank mania. Page Rank in layman's terms is Google's way of determining the relevancy and credibility of a page by counting the number of inbound links pointing to that page, of course together with a lot of other factors. This has lead to some BLACK HAT SEO techniques related to link building, including automated reciprocal link building, link farming, comment and testimonial page spamming among others. Our client was a victim of testimonial page spamming and I'd like to share few tips on how to avoid comment and testimonial spam.

1. Get Akismet www.akismet.com -- The sheer number of spam that Akismet blocks is enough reason for you to install it. I read from other people's testimonial that this light script is blocking thousand of spam everyday from their blogs and it wouldn't hurt if you try it to your site that is being infested by spammers.

2. Use the Blog Script to its potential -- Most blog script out there including wordpress and blogger is equipped with spam fighting options. You can either disable the comment feature or enable moderation before comment or testimonial appear on your page.

3. If your site is developed from scratch, make sure your programmer included the feature to moderate testimonial or comment submission. This will allow you to review new submission and delete unwanted ones. We have this feature in this client's website but I believe they did toggle on the moderation option.

Finally, if spammers won't see your page, there's no way they can spam it. You can set your robots.txt NOINDEX option so it will not be crawled by visiting robots -- robots are automated software agents that seeks content on the internet, and from within individual web pages and is a vital part of how search engines operate.

To know more about how to fight spam, visit our website at http://www.iconcept.com.ph

Owen V. Cruz

Former Telecom Engineer / Systems Developer - Smart Communications Inc.
Former Product Development Engineer - Wataniya Telecoms, Kuwait
Co-founder - IBRAINS Technologies Corp. - IT and Telecom Contracting Firm
Co-founder - iCONCEPT Marketing and Advertising, Inc. - Website Design Firm
Co-founder - Fast Tech Security Management, Inc. - Security Agency
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