Singapore Search Marketer
Traffic Acquisition Consultant | Bring Quality Traffic to Businesses

Learnt something new today about buying domains from the site Groupon.com. If you are interested in a domain name but its taken already, and the owner doesnt want to sell. Dont give up just yet.

Be persistent and understand the owners needs and objective for that domain and lastly act fast. Once you have your product ready to launch and done all the necessary paper work, you will have the upper hand. Of course it pays to have some serious money as well to fund your trademark and domain purchase too.

Read how did Groupon get their domain name on Mixergy.

Its been awhile since I last login to blog. Last I did want while playing with WordPress iPhone app on the train. Today I managed to find sometime after a few crazy months to come in and do some spring cleaning.

Guess what, 195 comments that’s the figure I was greeted with since my last login to RyanPham.com. All of which are just spam. This comment spam is quite irritating as it takes up alot of space and time to actually remove them all.

Ok its all my fault for not installing or activating Akismet and other spam plugins. So now, I am here to make it right.Here’s what I did to stop comment spam on wordpress short of changing the default comment page

• Activate Akismet with my API key
• Dont allow a set of keywords
• Close all comments after a set amount of days
• All comments to be approved by moderator

That’s about what I just did, do you have more to add?

Ever wonder what did people do on the train when there wasnt a thing called the iphone?

Well looking around, I get people sleeping, people playing with their fingers, people staring into a blank space (deep in thought), people listening to their iPods or mp3 players, people playing the psp(popular gadget on the train), people reading newspaper, people chatting on the phone, couples hugging, kids sitting on the train floor, people using their laptops, all doing their own things.

Wonder what will happen if someone goes up and chats with a total stranger In the train, would they take the fellow as crazy, be on their guard or embrace his friendliness?

Ok Im bored and to fill my time on the train where there isn’t any 3g, I decided to write this. Now that I have 3g it’s back to my regular iPhone activities.

But if u do have a take on the above please feel free to drop a comment

Midnight supper food in Singapore. Scissors Curry Rice at the corner of Jalan Besar Rd and Kitchener Rd – 229 Jalan Besar, Singapore 208905.

Word of advice, if you are driving there the lots at the side have been removed. So you have to either park at the new shopping mall and walk or pray hard that there is lots on the other side.

Here’s a question that many have asked and I bet are still trying to figure out, when it comes to international site optimization what should be done.

• Should you use local top level domains or use country specific sub domains?
• Should you use the same content from your .com site or customize it?
• Should you use the same design layout for consistency with your main .com or use a totally different version?

Your company has plans to expand to multiple markets but can’t really get the organic search strategy for the localized sites penned down.

What to do? Here’s a list of guidelines that I use when thinking about international seo.

• Use local top level domains if possible. You need to check with tech to see if this is cost effective. If not I will opt for the Sub domain route and the sub folder route last.
• Countries that don’t use English as their primary language is straight forward use their native language. But for English speaking markets, you will need to localize the content to make it fit the locals.

  How? Some tips

Use their local lingo in content

Understand culture terms

Display products and services in local currency

Run promotions based of local events

Having a local mailing address is a plus.

• Usability is also a must, localize your user interface to fit the locals. If your users don’t like your site layout they wouldn’t stay and that’s bad.
• Site structure can be the same as your .com domain or if you want change is slightly to fit the logical flow of the locals. Remember to use local lingo in the URL structure as well.
• Set the target markets in Webmaster tools for each site so that Google knows who the site is targeting.
• Getting inbound links from local sites, this can be slightly harder to get but its a must.

So this is my take on international SEO, do you have any other items to add to the list? Please feel free to drop your suggestions in the comments below

Was checking out adcenter – https://adcenter.microsoft.com/ eariler with my chrome browser and I got this incompatible browser warning.

Initially I thought it wouldnt work with Chrome, but once you click on the continue button it works. Microsoft almost tricked me into changing browsers, haha

Just posted my last post on some random snapshots of my day to day encounters with the PC, showing how wonky it can be or maybe how random i can get

So I was just Google my name for fun and I am amazed that Google has indexed and is ranking my latest post in the 2nd indent. I know its not new and Google has increased its speed of indexing but still its pretty cool for Google to index and rank so fast even for a small site like mine

Doing some computer maintenance and found some of these snapshots that I taken over the past few months that I experienced with my battle proven Dell Vostro. So here’s some of the snapshots

Chrome Tab dies on me

Chrome crashed, needs to restart

Wego.com during Beta phrase

Checking out the Google Adsense adreview center

Creative in Google admanager broken

Was trying to get a custom script to work on my hostgator hosting earlier, but somehow the XML file that I am trying to parse is too big and its eating up too much sharef resources.

Thats such a bummer. Oh well, I just decided to install a local apache server on my windows Vista (Its a work comp). Googled for some tutorials on installing PHP and I found something even better. This product offering lets me run a webserver off cdroms and thumbdrives, no instalation need. Pretty cool eh.

You get to run mysql, php and apache without doing any work on Windows, thats the ultimate goal man. So whats the program, well its called Server2Go and you can get it here at Server2Go-web.de. It donation ware which means pay what you like when you like only if you find it useful nice right

Let me try it out now to see how well it works out.

Update – Server2Go is such a good tool. Download it, run the exe file and you have the webserver up and running. It even has PHPmyadmin pre-installed nice.

Here’s a write up by Dan Bucko on some common mistakes made when designing a navigation for websites. There’s a list of items marketer should bear in mind.

Pretty cool tips that might be missed out or taken for granted as marketers

Check it out – Easy website navigation: A marketer’s map