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Basic and Advanced SEO Tutorials and News - SEO Hacker Blog
SEO Hacker is an SEO Services Company and SEO Blog in the Philippines
It’s not a secret that there are now a good number of SEO companies in the Philippines. SEO Hacker is one of them. We are now officially going 9 years and have grown to a team of almost 30 in-house individuals. Just for giving you some news on us (which I haven’t done for a long while) here’s what’s been happening to SEO Hacker as an SEO Company here in the Philippines.
It’s not much but SEO Hacker has slowly but surely grown its social circle. Our latest stats are:
SEO Hacker Facebook Page: 22,433 – People who click on our Like button get to have our page feeds every time we post a new update in the SEO Hacker blog.
SEO Hacker Facebook Group: 4,729 – A community for up-coming SEO specialists. Spam and self-promotion is highly moderated and discouraged.
Google+ Page: 6,889 followers (with over 9,100 +1’s) – Great people who have us in their circles are highly appreciated. Hope you guys appreciate the stuff we share!
More than 7,000 people subscribed to our Email List – all of whom we’ve kept confidential. They are happily receiving our latest entries every time we post a new one.
SEO School has over 2,000 members! We try to keep things simple and concise with all our lessons. The school has gone a design revamp and a huge development in system – click here to check it out!
We get around 3,000 direct traffic to our blog entries each month. In the three plus years that I’m blogging, I consider myself blessed to have that number recognize our branding. I think that branding has a lot to do with SEO today. (Check out our post on that one)
The point is, it’s not an overnight thing to build a community and brand. It takes hard work, consistency, creativity and commitment. These are just numbers. The underlying value of our company isn’t really in how big our community is but how well we serve them and how well we take care of our brand.
If you didn’t know, SEO Hacker provides SEO services (duh!) around the world. We have catered to international and Philippine brands in our many years in the SEO industry. We do more than just SEO, we care about your brand. You can check out our SEO and Internet Marketing Packages here.
We have recently revamped our SEO Services website – check it out and tell us how you like it!
I know that this will probably not put me in the Mr. Congeniality spot but in my honest opinion, most SEO companies here in the Philippines are doing it wrong. I see websites, I see them rank for certain keywords and I think to myself: “is this really how it should be?”
There are those who sell with good sales copies in their website but when you check out their rankings, they are not performing at all (it’s obvious which keywords an SEO Company website is ranking for just by looking at their homepage Title Tags and their ‘SEO Services’ pages).
Two words: Not Impressed.
I want to challenge these companies to a higher standard. Practice what you preach. The first and best selling point of providing SEO services to a client is that your website itself is ranking well for your target keywords! I can’t express how many SEO companies I’ve seen over the web that are not ranking for their own target keywords and yet they are selling their stuff to other companies.
It’s just like a farmer without chickens selling eggs – they are obviously not your eggs. You’re either a reseller or you really don’t have eggs to sell.
On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of SEO companies in the Philippines that are ranking on the first page for keywords that I’m competing with – drop. The latest update on Google Penguin has come out. It’s meant to make search results more relevant – hence, less spammy. Any methods that are considered unethical, spammy or invaluable by Google in any way, will not go unnoticed.
There are still lots of SEO companies in the Philippines that practice raw, invaluable linking. There are also those who practice thin content, spun articles, cloaking – I’ve seen my share of these. If you’re testing it out on your own test websites, that’s fine but don’t do it on your clients!
It’s sad to say that right now, even with the rise of new SEO companies here in our country, there are still lots of bad eggs. I would love to see things change and take a different route. SEO in the Philippines doesn’t have to be this way – it doesn’t have to be spammy and unethical.
As such, I’m sure there are SEO companies out there that are doing it right. We have our examples of great SEO companies abroad. Companies like SEOmoz, Distilled, SearchEngineLand, etc. And if you haven’t noticed, I’m simply patterning my content marketing and SEO strategy to them – because I think they are doing it right.
SEO Hacker is focused in making our client as the leaders in the search engine results page. We want to put them up. We want to help them generate revenue. This is our goal. We believe this can be achieved with the best long-term strategies there is: Branding, content marketing, and white-hat SEO.
I know that it’s really tough to educate and sell white-hat SEO to prospective clients. Especially to prospective clients who are thrifty and critical. But hey, SEO is an investment. Internet usage in the Philippines is on the rise and it will only keep on increasing. It’s not a matter of ‘IF’ but a matter of ‘WHEN’.
Those companies who are willing to invest in great SEO that provides value and that will last are our perfect idea for a client. It’s true that these types of clients are rare and scarce – but there lies the adventure, doesn’t it?
I recently ran into a client who signed a contract with me. To my surprise, their website was in the sandbox – just when the latest Google penguin rolled out. I checked out the reasons behind it and found out some pretty interesting stuff.
You see, there was this SEO company that they hired that did their SEO for a cheap price. Sometimes companies don’t bother to wonder why the price is low when the SEO company promises quite a number of things. You see, I have a simple perspective for business: “If it’s too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.”
To make the long story short, this cheap SEO company cloaked some stuff in my client’s website for the SEO company’s own benefit. There were hidden links and some pretty nasty keywords that were left hidden from users but blatantly bare for search engines to crawl.
It was an… Experience for me. I had to dig deep and get my hands dirty studying black hat SEO just to try and find out how to reverse this and get my client out of Google Sandbox.
Sad to say, this is a fresh thing and I’m still in the process of trying to figure out how I can remove these damaging, cloaked stuff in my client’s website. I have a number of solutions up my sleeve though.
In all, running an SEO company here in the Philippines, I would say that I had it good. God has blessed me with great clients, a great team and an impossible company history. I wish that the SEO industry here in the Philippines would improve. We need to perform and live by a higher standard. I don’t want the term ‘SEO’ to have a bad ring here someday.
Now, don’t get me wrong. This post has existed for quite some time in my mind. If you try to Google ‘SEO Company Philippines’ in Google.com it will show up a set of results. I’ve not tried to compete with that exact keyword – until now. I want to see how Google’s freshness algorithm, social signals, some of our internal linkjuice, and some of our SEO best practices will work in the latest Penguin update.
This post is an excellent experiment to test that out due to the high competition of the keyword ‘SEO Company Philippines’ – so since this is laid bare for you to follow anyway, why don’t you check it out for yourself how far this post could rank?
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