Back from San Jose SES

Hello everybody, I just came from San Jose SES (Search Engine Strategies), and now I’m busy updating my job’s daily basis.

During the next days I’ll be posting information taken from San Jose SES. These entries may be a brief summary based on the notes I took from the tracks attended. Be prepared, there’s a lot of valuable info.

What to say about San Jose SES, I learned a lot from the speakers at the conference, but being sincere I was waiting for more “fresh” information or better tips for SEM. Most of the topics exposed can be easily found through webmasters forums or SE blogs and press releases. I believe those conferences are more helpful in order to meet people involved on the Search Engine and the Internet industry, than to go and hear deep techniques to make a website more competitive and optimize; also helpful to try resources and tools to measure and to track SEM and SEO campaigns.

However even with good or bad point of views from different persons, SES should be attended at least twice on a year or depending on the budget, will be good to go to a SMX as a good way to stay informed. The more conferences you go, the most interesting conversations you may be involved and that’s how to acquire ideas and knowledge.

Does Google likes to be cheated?

Since weeks ago, I’ve doing SEO for a poker website and as seo does, I’m trying to put them on higher SERPS.

On the strategy I planned, the first step was to change all html templates into a CSS version (the less the code, the more the text density). After that I also got rid of “iframe” and “frame” tags because we all know that Search Engines dislikes them in order to avoid hidden content or non-related content that will cheat them. We got a reward for our effort, after less than a week Google gave us a boost from page 9 into page 2.

After that, I started an analysis on my competitor’s websites just to learn from them… so I discovered something strange was happening…

By doing a search with the keyword “online poker” at Google, take a look at result number 2 (www.pacificpoker.com) and number 15 (www.888.com) which used to be number 2 and 3…. a week ago. But what are the weird things over those sites… Let’s compare Google’s cached result against the website’s source code…

If you are able to find the 7 differences and enumerate them you’ll beat the game and then you’ll discover an easy way to cheat Google by serving different content to search engines instead of content received by visitors. Of course I’m a little “upset” because they have being there for over 6 months as I heard from my boss.

I would like to know your comments about why the mighty and powerful Google’s algorithm admits these kinds of websites doing suspicious techniques against their guidelines.

A friend of mine said that Google may like to be cheated from time to time, just to put on a test or to confuse SEO consultants from some industries, by changing the way to rank pages using different combinations that can give them control on the demand, but some failures as those may occur. Is that true ? or should I say: “Are these Gray hat’s SEO examples?

SEO from Costa Rica with Love!

After being doing SEO for more than 6 years and during this time I’ve being involved in the gambling, the adult dating and also the home loan industries. i wanted to start a new chapter on my life.

I believe I’m not a bad SEO consultant, since a big percentage of my pages rank well and even some of those abandoned websites I did for companies I worked before. Also I’m proud to say I know a little more than the average of SEO consultants in Costa Rica. But then I should admit and be humble to say that I still need to learn some techniques to increase my knowledge and to raise my skills.

The idea to make this page www.seo-smart.com, came to my mind because I would like to inform my partners, colleagues and ther amateurs on the SEO world, about the news that affect (for the good or the bad), our job and to share ideas that can help us in the way to be a professional SEO consultant.

I hope this SEO website will be helpful for both of us… you the one that reads, because I want you to get very sharp information about search engines behavior; and me, because I want to learn from you and then receive extra money from my advertisers.

SEO-Smart is made from Costa Rica, with love to all of you!