Will Valero Get A Chance at Pacquiao?

Original Article.

After much success in Japan and an impressive record of 23 wins, all by knockouts and 20 of them in the first round, rumors started circulating last year that Valero is up for Pacquiao. I thought it's going to be an exciting fight, really, after seeing all those videos from Youtube, but then Valero has a problem-- he is ineligible to fight in the United States because he failed the required MRI exam for boxers(he suffered from a motorcycle accident before he turned professional).

The big question therefore is: will Pacquiao get out of his comfort zone and fight outside of the Philippines and the US? It seems like he's already graduated from fighting in Japan, but will he go back there so as to face a worthy fighter like Valero?

Of course I'm rooting for Manny Pacquiao. I just thought it's going to be one hell of a fight. But again, after Pacquiao fights Marquez in Mandalay Bay Hotel and Resort at Las Vegas this coming March 15, 2008, there are already talks of his fight with Ricky Hatton, the British fighter. (What? Hatton? Isn't he too big for Manny?) So, not only does he graduate from fighting in Japan, he also moves out of his title as the Mexican Assassin, that is, after finishing off Marquez in March, which I'm sure he will. Anyway, that means Valero must not be anywhere near Pacquiao's table as of the moment.

And to think Valero is really eager to take a shot and duel with Manny's power and speed. Who doesn't?



Trivia:
Did you know that more Filipinos know of Edwin Valero than his fellow Venezuelans?

Pacquiao vs Marquez 2 (March 15, 2008, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas)

Original Article Link.

It's official! The fight between our local sports hero Manny "Pacman" Pacquiao and Juan Manuel "Dinamita" Marquez is scheduled on March 15, 2008 at Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. That's another Sunday morning boxing fight for us Filipinos.

Pacquiao, known as the Mexican Assassin, aims to settle the speculations about his power, speed and stamina after he failed to defeat Marquez during the first fight.

Here's the official blog of the fight.
Pacquiao vs. Marquez II

There you'll find compilation videos of previous fights by both fighters and the latest-breaking news about their much anticipated boxing bout on March 15. You'd also find some pictures, and an article listing the common misspells of Pacquiao, including(but not limited to), Pacquaio, Pacuiao, and Pacqiuao, which us Filipinos often commit while looking up the sports icon in Google. We recognize Manny as our national sports hero yet we can't spell his name properly.

Guess we all know now why we gave him the nick "Pacman."

The first fight was a draw, although Marquez was obviously hurt in the first round by Pacquiao when he went down three times. This next fight should be more exciting. I'm rooting for our hero of course. Go Manny!

Here's a video of the three first round knockdowns of Marquez, a first in his career.



Here's a link to the official website of Manny Pacquiao. There you'll find a countdown clock to the fight on March 15 (March 16 here in the Philippines).

I’m All For SEO–Should You Be?

Original Article Link.

SEO(Search Engine Optimization) was not in my paradigm when I was laying out the first few articles of this website. In fact all I know about SEO is what it stands for and how to spell it. Then I chanced upon one article on the Net last week, an article on SEO which I forgot to bookmark and can't find to this day. In any case the damage has been done and I woke up one day telling myself that I'm going to try SEO for this site. I'll join in some of the local mini-SEO contests and try little to full-blown experiments of my own. If you've been following my blog, here's the stats that I've got from two of them so far.

For my Pin@y Sc@ndal project - 228 Unique Page Views for 1 Week

Friendster/Freindster Theme project, 82 Unique Page Views for barely 2 days

I'm not anywhere near the top searches for the first one(most of my traffic came from "pinged" websites who are into the pin@y sc@ndal project) but I had some immediate success with the second. For some reason, my blog is now getting a lot of traffic from Google for "friendster themes". Why? I have the littlest idea.

Just these two projects alone tell me already that SEO is a very tricky business. It can work or not work for you. But you know what? I'm more than convinced that this SEO can be big for my blog. If you would like to know why, retrace my steps and figure out for yourself. Since SEO is tricky and I'm not even on the tip of the SEO iceberg, I just can't speak of it the way I can share my knowledge in setting up Wordpress. So whenever I do SEO posts like this one and tell you that I've earned $3 from my 2 projects alone so far, just READ BETWEEN THE LINES.

Ok, that's unfair. But I'll try to quote here one article about SEO I really liked.

...(T)ake linkbaiting for example. Is it SEO? Let's see now...quality content? Check. Attracts links? Check. Promoted through network of friends and to an audience looking for this type of resource? Double check.

Or let's take good site design. Sitemaps, good navigation and internal linking? Check. Short, meaningful URLs? Check. Proper webmastering tactics such as 301 redirects and using .htaccess? Double check. The problem is in the definition and unfortunately this is where people tend to define SEO based on their own agenda. If you're pushing blogging, SEO is snake-oil salesmen pushing 1000s of free directory links.

Here's the thing - SEO is SEO by any other name. You may call it 'new media', or blog marketing, or site optimization, or plain ol' marketing.

It's the same damn thing.

Bloggers need SEO because it offers a single system for managing your blog's marketing. It's a set of guidelines and tools that will push to be a better marketer, a better writer and a better webmaster.

But most of all, Bloggers need SEO because SEO is exactly what they are doing most of the time on their blog.

Let's test that claim. Do you make an effort to write quality, link-worthy content? Isn't that SEO?

Do you network with fellow bloggers in your niche? Isn't networking part of SEO?

Do you launch your blog with a bunch of trusted links from top blogs, friends and a few good directories? Isn't that SEO?

And another article from Yuga. I'll just provide you with the link.

Of course, Marhgil was of big help. and so is Google Trends.

*


So know I'm in SEO. Officially. I'll be releasing several articles which will have no relation to the goals of this website--articles which will target traffic coming from search engines and will hopefully bring financial freedom to this blog... But this website is all about helping Filipinos out there, so I've thought of one little way to help you guys with SEO. I'll do my own research for possible keywords you can optimize your blog for, and I'll release them all under a new category called "Keyword For The Day." What should you do with them? Here are three simple steps.

1. Research and write a substantial post about the keyword. Make sure it is in the title.



2. Do a google search for the keyword. For all blogs you can see amongst the top results, leave a comment with a link going to your post. Decide beforehand for how many blogs you will be doing this.



3. Wait. If you get traffic from it, write some new one. Go back to the first step.

I won't be explaining how I come up with the keyword. If you will ask me then I'll be forced to give you my default answer "through instinct." I can promise you though that I will do a lot of my research first before I release the keyword. Also, it may or may not work for you. But if they don't, what's there to lose? :)

P.S. I'm watching Tom Hanks in Cast Away while I'm writing this post. Sorry kung sabog.

Is Freindster A Keyword? (Friendster Layouts Themes Skins Templates part 2)

Original Article Link.

If you're looking for the best Friendster Theme Skin Layout Template compilation on the Internet, please click the picture below. Otherwise, if you would like to know how to earn money online, please keep on reading.

If you have read some of my "serious" posts before and you chanced upon this blog again today, you might wonder why I had that post about friendster and why in the name of the WWW did I misspell it as "freindster" a million times. Well, I'd let you in a very obvious secret(teka, meron bang ganun?). I'm thinking of joining the SEO bandwagon. Enough with just great content. Hehe.

I hope to do a more in-depth discussion on Search Engine Optimization(SEO) for my next article, but for those who don't know anything about it yet, I will try to frame here what SEO is in a simple sentence. SEO is all about ranking high in search engines like Yahoo and Google for very specific popular keywords as searched by Internet users worldwide.

Two Filipino blogs influenced me to dip a foot in SEO, and I don't know if it's just a coincidence that their names sound alike. The first one is Marc Macalua's www.macalua.com, and the other is Marghil Macuha's www.macuha.com. Basing from their sites and some of their articles, Marc has been blogging since 2003 while Marhgil just started his website January of 2007, although he has been managing some blogspots earlier than that. I guess it is safe to say that Marc has started SEO way ahead of the pack while Marhgil probably read some of Marc's post before being a self-professed "SEO Addict" himself. Could Marhgil have chosen macuha.com because many people mistype or misspell macalua as macuha in their browsers? Hehe. Of course this is just a joke, but a very important one considering that's the track I'll be leading you in this post. (No offense Marhgil, I just thought it would prove my point in this article. And of course it's your surname, so there shouldn't even be any doubt.)

Right now, every keyword (a word or group of words keyed in by people in search engines) that you can think of already have their equivalent search results in Google and Yahoo. The rankings of these websites for that keyword may change because the search engines have spiders or bots or crawlers and a very funky algorithm way which determines the popularity of the website from links and relevant content... (wait, I remember saying that I'll do a separate article on this. Anyway, 'di ko na lang ie-erase.. sayang naman ang sinulat ko. Back to the article.)

Speaking of Marhgil, he already started a mini SEO project wherein he included the keywords "friendster layout, "friendster skins" into his personal blog because of its showing on Google Trends. Sure enough, he got some traffic from search engines coming from those keywords. Just before December ended, he released a list of keywords that are getting people to his website. And true to the SEO spirit, he is now trying "vedio" and "qoutes," misspellings of the words "video" and "quotes" respectively, as his new keywords.

Basically, what Marhgil is probably trying to do is to get the market for misspelled keywords, and already he is having some success with "vedio," which is searched by thousands of people from Morocco. Why not go for the big time keywords like "video," which is the correct spelling? Here's the reason: the more popular a keyword is, the larger and better the competition, such that it is sometimes better for bloggers(who are generally blogging small-time and for personal reasons) to resort to optimizing for repeated keyword "mistakes" committed by Internet users. Optimization for such keywords really do bring traffic to one's blog, and whatever the quality of that traffic is, it is still, traffic. More traffic of course generally leads to more financial returns.

There are two reasons why you should optimize for misspelled keywords. First is you want to educate, and tell the people that what they search-typed is the wrong spelling for that keyword. This can seem ridiculous for some bloggers but some actually do it. Second, you can make use of the extra or heavier traffic coming from search engines to monetize your blog. I think the combination of this two should always constitute your forage into misspelled keyword SEO.

And hence, after all this impurely nonsensical self-realizations, I would like to inform you of my second SEO project, freindster (the first one, of course, got me a 50 unique visitors just on the first day of posting, and continually brings traffic to this blog, making me think really hard about SEO). I was brainstorming for a probable misspelled search term for some time now and just this morning settled on friendster. Being a Filipino and guilty of wrong spellings all my life, I immediately tried freindster in Google Trends and to my surprise, it came out with some fancy graphs which says that the word actually has some search volume(guess from where). Without thinking twice I laid out my first freindster article, and in 1 minute came up with possible misspellings of the keyword. After pondering the situation and my "eureka" moment, the article seemed lonely so I had to make something else, which took 2 hours of my time. (If you've read the first article, hopefully not, you should know what I'm talking about.) Anyway, as I was finishing this afternoon, I finally thought of actually searching "freindster" in Google and in Yahoo. For both, the top result is www.friendster.com, and some other friendster-related websites. I didn't understand it at first and had to recheck whether I misspelled the misspelled word "freindster" and actually typed the correct keyword "friendster." When I realized I did typed in "freindster," I said to myself "@#$@#$." I think the search engines have long since took any keyword near "friendster" as friendster, and as such they return the only proper result. Only after typing "freindster" with the quotation marks did freindster results actually came in.

Hehe. So much for my misspelled keyword project. So my question now is: if the search engines correct search results for misspelled keywords like "freindster," can you still consider them as proper keywords?

P.S.
I do not know the answer. Perhaps in a month or three months. If it is a keyword, then I'm not sure how I can rank for it considering almost no one searches with quotation marks. Also, I'm still crossing my fingers because a comparative search on "friendster" and "freindster" using Trends gives some odd result which I think does not reflect actual search results.

If it is not a keyword then I have half-a-day and this is one article as zits to look at in the mirror for all my web publishing career.

New Friendster Layouts, Skins, Themes and Templates

Original Article Link.

Are you looking for a brand new spanking supercalifragilistic Friendster Layout Theme Skin and Template? Well you've come to the right place.

If you haven't noticed it yet, there are a lot of Friendster Template websites currently on the Internet. That's good right? No! The problem with so many Freindster Skin websites is that you can waste a lot of your time looking for that perfect theme. So here's what I did. Everytime I change the Friendster Theme of our Friendster account, I take note of that theme and put it in a separate website. If you want to take a look at our favorites and used themes, you might want to check it out. Please click on the picture below.



As I've said, I recently compiled my favorite Friendster templates there which are all available for you for download. I have also a tutorial there on how to change your skin or your theme, which of course, concerns the CSS box and the Media box. There are other sites that offer free themes. Use the links below.

• Friendster Layouts


• Freindster Layouts 2


• Friendster Skins


• Friendster Skinz


• The Best Skins and Templates

Wait! Before you go, perhaps you have misspelled Friendster which eventually brought you here. This article lists the following keywords as misspellings of friendster.

• Friendster


• Freindster


• Freinster


• Frendster


• Friensdter


• Prendster


• Freindter


• Feindster


• Frindster


• Friendstr


• Friendser

Just to remind you, the correct spelling of Friendster is F R I E N D S T E R. Ok? Here's a link to their website. Friendster.Com

Cheerio!