SEO Blog Money

SEO tips for relaunching website

Frank Rui Jiang — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 23:11:15 +0000

It’s been a while (probably 3 weeks) that I haven’t blogged anything because I was on holiday in Spain and Portugal for 2 weeks, and this week I was busy preparing the relaunching of our company’s website. Our company is a web design company, this re-design was planned since 1 year ago, but never got it done due to huge amount of work for clients.

SEO is really important no matter if your website is in development process, in maintenance or in re-launching stage, there are many factors to be considered and checked carefully, not only for the sake of SEO, but also for your website and customers.

So here are some useful SEO tips for re-launching the website, some of them may seem obvious, but they are often overlooked.

1. Broken links

Broken links are really bad for your website, and not just because search engines don’t like them, your customers hate them too. Imagine one of customers is browsing your pages with great interest in your services, and all of sudden, he clicks a link and see a big bad 404 page. Do you think he will stay or just leave?

Can links be checked if they are broken on the local server? Yes, here is a great tool called Xenu can help you with it. It checks your website’s links within few minutes, so you don’t need to click around to find broken links on your own anymore.

Note: When uses Xenu, if you have customised 404 page, the broken links won’t be shown in red color. You can find broken links by searching for “404″ (ctrl+F).

2. Redirects

Often when a website is relaunching, there are more or less URL issues. For example, our company site used to have /page/ in every service page’s URL, now they are gone, but google already indexed them, so how to deal with it?

Answer is 301 redirect, but should you redirect every old url? It is quite controversial, many professionals think all the old urls should be redirected to the new ones, even if there isn’t any new page relevant to the old one (old pages may be redundant and some people redirect them to homepage). And some professionals (you need to be a SEOmoz pro member to see this article) don’t think it’s necessary to redirect all the old links, because Google is pretty good at identifying the broken links, so you should only redirect the important links.

I personally think only the important links need to be redirected, but how to evaluate whether a link is important or not? Evaluate a link from two aspects, 1. is it important to your customers? 2. does it receive link juices?

It’s easy to see whether it is important to your customer or not, just open your analytics account and see how many visits that particular page receives, if the number of visits is reasonable, there is no reason not to redirect the old link.

It’s harder to determine link juices a page receives, because link juices come from not only other websites, but also your internal pages. In order to check link juices which flow from other websites, you can use yahoo site explorer to see how many inbound links you have got for a particular page. To determine internal link juices, open your google webmaster account and there is an “internal links” sector for you to look into. If you are a SEOmoz pro member, “top pages tool” will get the job done for you more accurately. (internal + external)

3. Robots.txt

Check your robots.txt, the site is very possibly blocked from search engines in the design stage. DO check it!

4. On-page optimisation

It’s the best opportunity to get on-page factors updated and optimised. Title, content, keyword mapping, img alt tag…etc, do you best to optimise them for both search engines and real customers. Here is on-page optimisation checklist that you can follow.

Note: SEO is useless if your website cannot convert. (means give you REAL MONEY) Do place “call-to-action” throughout your service or product pages, and keep user experience issues in mind.

5. Web analytics and result tracking

You re-launch or re-design your website is to get better results right? Don’t be satisfied by seeing number of visits increasing or number of page views increasing. Deeply analyse web data and try to understand your customers’ behaviors, it’s the key to develop your business. Google Analytics is powerful, but it’s not powerful enough, you may also want to implement other tools to release the potential of your website such as Google Website Optimiser and Crazyegg…etc

6. Don’t re-launch your website on Friday!

I think this one is the best relaunching SEO tip, no matter how well you think you’ve done, there will be problems! Relaunch it on Monday, so your programmers have 4 working days to fix everything.

Re-launch a website means more challenges to face and more opportunities to catch, it’s a whole new start point for SEO, never stop hard working.

You can find my full SEO checklists here, some of the check points in that post will help you with re-launching the website too.

Full SEO checklist from scratch

Frank Rui Jiang — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:37:19 +0000

Every SEOer has his/her own SEO checklist, and it needs to be adjusted quite often for different types of clients. So few days ago, I decided to build this full lists on my blog, so it’s easier for me to find it anywhere anytime, and maybe it can help you as well.

I know this list is far away from perfect, and I will update it on weekly basis. Therefore, I need your help, if I made any mistake (even grammer), please point out, if you have any good point that hasn’t been in this checklist, please let me know by leaving the comments. As a return, I would love to place your link (dofollow) either in reference or contributor if you make this list better.

seo checklist

#Domain registration#

Brainstorm keywords that best describe your business

-    Find one-word or two-word terms, don’t exceed three-word

Ask yourself if your business is limited within a country or not.

-    Choose .com or .co.uk (or other tld) wisely. If you choose TLD other than .com, do buy .com as well and set up 301 redirection.

Create a unique and short domain.

-    E.g. for keyword “seo”, “seomoz.com” is 100 times better than “bestseocompany.com”

Check potential trademark infringement before you register the domain

Find local reliable hosting provider

-    If your business is within UK, then find a UK web host.

Choose between dedicated IP or shared IP

-    If you are company, make sure to use dedicated IP; if you are just having a blog, make sure to check if your IP is on the ban list

#Keyword research checklist#

Turn off personalised search

-    Personalised search may influence keywords ranking check

Write down the main services you provide

-    Some of them or all of them will be your core keywords

-    Make sure you have individual pages for each of your core keywords

Expand the keywords (10-20 for each core keyword, may expand even more in the future)

-    Find possible long-tail keywords around core keywords. E.g. for core keywords “search engine optimisation”, you may want to have long-tail keywords such as “seo checklist” and “seo ranking factors”. These topics are extremely relevant to core keywords and will benefit core keywords in the future.

Analyse the difficulties to rank these keywords

-    Use SEO tools to find out how difficult these keywords are to rank on 1st page of SERP

-    Analyse competitors to understand how strong they are in terms of on-page optimisation and global link popularity.

#Web structure checklist#

Turn off cookies and Disable JavaScript

-   You may find preference setting problems by turning off cookies

-   Check is global navigation still working after disabling JavaScript

Keep site structure flat

-    best to keep within three levels

Minimise potential page loading speed problem

-    external CSS and JavaScript minifying

Robots.txt

-    prevent googlebot from crawling some pages you don’t want google to see

Use HTML

-    Minimise the use of Ajax, iFrame, JavaScript, Flash…etc, best to avoid them

Valid HTML & CSS

-    Does not do any harm to website’s performance on search engine unless there are severe errors which affect crawling

Broken link

-    Make sure there is no broken link, especially for important pages. There is debate about

Sitemap

-    Both html version and xml version

Browser compatibility

-    Make sure website is compatible with evil IE series

Keywords mapping

-    Assign appropriate topics throughout the pages

Keyword cannibalisation

-    Be wary of keyword cannibalisation and make sure to link from subtopics to main topics. E.g. you may want to have a link back to “SEO checklist” page on “the best SEO checklist” blog entry

Short and descriptive URLs

-    It’s not always good practice to have all your keywords in your service or product page’s url, especially they are long and hard to remember. E.g. example.com/they-are-long-and-hard-to-remember, the better practice would be example.com/long. But for blog posts, it’s another story.

Internal linking

-   Set up links between pages, e.g. you offer SEO service and PPC service, if you mentioned PPC in your SEO service, do link it to PPC page.

#On-page optimisation checklist#

Keyword in title

-    Remember to put most appropriate keyword in title tag

-    Never do keyword stuffing

-    Keep your title descriptive and within 65 characters

-    The earlier position a keyword has, the more weight it will have. (But balance it wisely if your brand name has to be first)

Keyword in URL

-    As mentioned before, keep it short and descriptive

Keyword in H1

-    SEOmoz claimed that keyword in H1 is not as important as it used to be

-    H1 is intuitive to visitors to let them know what a page is about

-    Think about usability before you put keyword in H1

Keyword in content

-    Never keyword stuffing

-    Use synonyms

Keyword in image alt tag

-    Put keyword in image alt tag

Keyword in image file name

-    Both search engine and human being hate something like “ASDA2312asdas.jpg” right?

Keyword in bold

-    Keyword in bold and italic have same weight

Keyword in first 100 words

-    It’s a good practice to have the most important keyword in first 100 words, my personal experience was I couldn’t be bothered to read the whole article sometimes…

Canonical tag

-    Make sure to have a canonical tag on every important page pointing to correct url
Meta description

-    Only affect click through rate

-    Sometimes it’s better to let spider judge what to show in meta description

-    Quality links from local websites

Outbound links

-    Better not to exceed 150 outbound links

Anchor text

-   Although there is no evidence to prove anchor texts of internal links will affect ranking, but do it for the sake of web usability

#Local SEO#

Claim local business listing

-    Google local business center

-    Yahoo! Local

-    MSN local

Local data providers

-    Every country has different primary local data providers

Local business listing address in city of search

Local business listing with proper category

-    Make sure to list your company in the most appropriate category

Keyword in local business listing title

-    Never keyword stuffing

-    Keep descriptive

Keyword in local business listing description

-    Never keyword stuffing

-    Keep descriptive

Location in local business listing title

Location in local business listing description

Keyword in local business listing customer fields

-    List your main services or products

Address on every page

-    Search engine is very smart to recognise your address

-    Having address on all pages not only help search engine but also your visitors

Regular SEO process with local search in mind

-    Keyword in title

-    Keyword in content

Link building

Don’t build links just for link building

-    Don’t spam comments and social media profiles

-    Use comments and social media to communicate, you will get quality traffic and links in the long run
Partner

-    It’s reasonably easy to ask your partner to do you a favor and link to you

Directories

-    Premium and high quality directories such as yahoo directory and business.com

-    Niche directories

Quality content

-    Provide something useful and other websites don’t offer. Such as quality articles or even tools.
Content syndication

-    Publish compelling articles on authoritative article directories
Guest blogging

-    Many high quality blogs accept guest blogging, win-win
Widgets

-    Must be relevant to the content of the page receiving the link
Reverse engineering competitor’s link

-    One of the oldest techniques to find possible link sources

Reciprocal links

-    This is devalued since 2006, but if you have highly relevant websites to exchange links, why not, at least more potential visitors.

Comments, forums, social networks…etc

-    Most of these links are either devalued or having “nofollow” tags, but it can attract traffic and generate potential opportunities for others to link to you.

Press Release

-    Optimise your press release so it’s easier to get picked up by media editors
Link buying

-    Money makes things easy, doesn’t it? But be wary of potential penalty, it’s not funny if you get caught. But many companies purchased links and dominated the SERP, well, report them, pray they will get caught and keep working on building natural links.

#Web site/page performance#

Check if domain is penalised

-   Search for domain name, if it’s not indexed, you are in trouble

Check how many pages are indexed

-   Sometimes “site:example.com” is not accurate

Check duplicated content

-   If duplicated contents are found, check canonical tag

Check primary keywords ranking

Check total # of links and # of domains link back

Check anchor text distribution

References:

There are many many resources that I’ve read, but unfortunately I cannot remember all of them, so I will list the primary resources here. More references will be placed here if you leave useful resources in the comment (that can make this list better)

SEOmoz guides

SEObook link building 101

SEOmoz ranking factors

David Mihm local ranking factors

15 minutes SEO auditing

Contributors

If you contribute something great to this list, you will be placed here (with a link)

SEO rethink: Should we really not to link out to other websites?

Frank Rui Jiang — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:03:01 +0000

Most of the webmasters and SEOers know the importance of link building, including me. And we are trying to achieve inbound links at all costs, some people even purchase links to game search engine algorithm despite it is seriously violating Google guidelines and they can get caught. But nearly none of us would really want to link out to other websites, reason is simple, original Google PageRank algorithm makes us wary that the more external links a page has the more link juice it will lose. In our minds, we are scared to sacrifice PageRank to feed other potential competitors (you are linking to relevant topics, aren’t you). But is Google working in this way? Should we really not to link out to other websites?

seo link out

SEOmoz invited Marshall Simmonds, CEO of Define Search Strategies and Chief Strategist for the New York Times, to Whiteboard Studios. Marshall introduced how he managed SEO for broad topic pages, including create editorial contents and link to relevant (and useful of course) websites, even they are competitors. The idea is to either build a destination page or a jumping off page, which both of them will benefit search experience in my mind. But is this limited to broad topic SEO? I don’t think so. Let’s forget about wikipedia, new york times and about.com, they are too big. Take blogging as example, do top SEO bloggers really petty to give links away? I don’t see that. They link to useful resources, make it convenient for SEO community to find useful contents, why shouldn’t Google encourage people to do so?

Toolbar PageRank is no longer important, (This blog has TBPR of 3, but barely ranks for any SEO relevant keywords as it’s very young and don’t have many quality inbound links) it’s just a memory for most of SEO veterans. And we should stop thinking SEO using original PageRank algorithm, and we should optimise our website for the convenience of our audience.

So, as long as linking out can make your audience convenient, don’t hestitate to do it. And please keep in mind, reciprocal links on your sidebar don’t make your website easier to utilise.

How about you? Do you often link out to others?

How much money did you waste on Google Adwords

Frank Rui Jiang — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:05:25 +0000

Google adwords is the flagship product of Google Inc, and it is the biggest online advertising platform. Google generates more than 20 Billion US dollars via Google adwords. And yet it is probably the easiest advertising tool to use, you can set up an account with $5, choose targeting country and fill credit card information in, then choose your keywords and landing pages, write an ad copy and that’s it. Literally it can be finished with in 10 mins, super simple!

google adwords tax calculator

Today, I read a post on SEObook and found out this tool designed by ppcblog – Google Adwords Tax Calculator. It attracted my attention immediately. With my experience of managing multiple adwords campaigns containing tens of thousands of keywords and thousands of ad groups, I thought I should be pretty good. So I gave this tool a try, and I still waste 15% of my budget. Of course it might be inaccurate, but I think I should write a post to point out where should Adword newbies be careful about their accounts, Google Adword is easy to use and track ROI, and yet it is also very easy to waste money on it. (Otherwise how can Google earn $20,000,000,000 from it annually?)

Where are the easiest parts on Google Adwords you can waste your money?

1. Keywords Selection

Keywords selecting is an art, choose the most suitable keywords for your business to bid can make your adwords campaign become far more profitable. Don’t just pick up the ones with the highest search volume. The best SEO book so far “The Art of SEO” defines search queries into 3 categories, navigational queries, informational queries and transactional queries. Different types of search queries have different values, so choose your keywords wisely. Also bear in mind, users start using longer and longer search queries.

2. Keywords Match type

Can you believe it? About 50% of adwords income were generated from broad match keywords! That was 10 billion US dollars, how much advertisers’ money were wasted by bidding broad match keywords? I don’t know, but the amount would be huge. Some PPC experts use broad match keywords to find profitable search queries and than bid on them to maximise the return, but if you are not that sophisticated, use phrase match and exact match.

3. Negative keywords

One of the most effective ways to eliminate unnecessary search queries, if you are not offering free stuff, make sure to put “free” into negative keywords list. Here are some tips for finding negative keywords.

4. Ad groups structure

Always keep your keywords as few as possible in one ad group, but it does not necessarily mean you have to put only one keyword per ad group. I would say 5 – 10 really relevant keywords are good to start with. Well-organised ad groups can greatly help achieve high quality score, hence less money you have to pay per click. (Video of how Google calculates quality score is in this post)

5. Bidding strategy

Are you always bidding on first place? Because you think 1st place can bring you the most clicks, hence more profitable. But you are wrong, always bid for #1 can easily get you involved in bidding war, which will cost you a lot of money. Some authoritative researches indicate that bidding on position 5-7 is more profitable, my personal advice would be #4 if you don’t have the money to win bidding war. (Sometimes top 3 sponsor links display on top of the natural search results, and #4 becomes the top one in the sponsors list on the right)

6. Ad copy

Writing an excellent ad copy is the key to increase click through rate, hence save the money, because quality score is highly dependent on CTR. There is an essential role to keep in mind, don’t write you ad copy for the keywords, write it for your potential customers. And remember, even though your keywords in ad copy can be highlighted when visitors search, but if there are too many bolded keywords, that ad copy looks spammy.

7. Search and content network

Never ever bidding in both search network and content network at the same time, because customer behaviors are completely different. Further more, bidding on both networks can easily mess up your data, e.g. CTR on search network is normally higher than CTR on content network. So make sure seperate your search network campaign and content network campaign.

You are very welcome to leave your opinions as comments. Please let me know what you think

Open Site Explorer – FREE Backlink Analysis Tool by SEOmoz

Frank Rui Jiang — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:24:31 +0000

No doubt that Yahoo! Site Explorer is still the most popular Free backlink analysis tool in the world, but along with Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo search, webmasters clearly concern how Microsoft is going to deal with YSE. With SEOmoz’s dedication on Search Engine Optimisation, they created LinkScape, a great alternative to YSE. It also provides something that YSE doesn’t, such as mozRank, mozTrust, Anchor Text and how much trust an inbound link passes, these metrics can greatly help you to analyse the importance of back links.

free backlink analysis open site explorer

Yesterday, I received an Email from SEOmoz, they are launching the newest SEO tool Open Site Explorer, powered by SEOmoz Linkscape.

Here are some figures of Linkscape to show you how powerful its index is (and Open Site Explorer is Free!)

0.8 Trillion Links
1.5 Trillion URLs
63 Million Root Domains

Here are the metrics it provides for better backlink analysis

Page Authority: Overall URL score combining all link metrics
Domain Authority: Overall score for the root domain
Total Link: Followed, nofollowed and 301 redirecting pages
External Followed Link: 301 redirects and followed links from other root domains
Linking Root Domain: Number of root domains with links to this URL
Link Page Title and URL
Anchor Text
Nofollow: If an inbound link has “nofollow” tag, it will be marked
Competitive Analysis: You can compare the performance between two websites, while linkscape can compare up to four.

Now, lets take two examples, SEOmoz Blog and SEObook Blog.

open site explorer seomoz vs seobook

link page title url and page authority

I just saw OpenSiteExplorer.org is give away special offers at the moment (20 Jan 2010, 19:00, London Time), PRO Access Preview! Free Full Access for Everyone for 48 Hours! I hope you don’t miss this opportunity to check this free tool out.

For those who never used premium version of Linkscape, I can offer you a chance to build a report for your website because I often have some credits left. (Limited!) All you have to do is contact me via my twitter @JR_seo, or email me (seoblogmoney@gmail.com) and share some link love (evil smile).

Last, what’s your thought on this tool? Please leave your comment. My $0.02 is I hope this tool can compare more sites rather than just two.

SEO Keywords Targeting: Put Synonyms in Your Content

Frank Rui Jiang — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 11:01:09 +0000

As the first step of Search Engine Optimisation, many SEOers often conduct a keywords analysis to choose the most appropriate terms to target. But some people also get confused by how many keywords they can target on a content page. SEOmoz posted an excellent article yesterday explaining how to employ multiple keywords for SEO.

seo synonyms keywords

Interestingly, Google search quality engineer, steve baker, wrote a post on official google blog to unveil how powerful Google actually is, Google can understand synonyms in your content! Then Matt Cutts blogged about it too!

In terms of “synonyms”, I am not talking about singular, plural or adding “in” between , i.e. I am not discussing about Google can recognise “SEO keyword”, “SEO keywords” and “Keywords in SEO” that they have the same meaning.

What I refer here, is that Google know:

keyword “bb” in search term “bb in london” is synonym of “Bed and Breakfast“;
“bb” in search term “bb application” is synonym of “BlackBerry“
“bb” in term “dura ace track bb axle njs” means “bottom bracket“

It means Google is smart enough to differentiate the difference of meanings of “bb”, so how can they not recognise something even simpler? Take “real estate” as an example, I believe google can easily understand “landed property” or “real property” in your content page means your primary keywords “real estate”, and vice versa.

How much can these synonyms help rank your primary keyword? I don’t know to be honest. But they will definitely increase your exposure on Google, because not only Google knows they are synonyms, but also you have more keywords in content now.

What’s your thought on utilising keywords synonyms for your SEO efforts?

How to increase CTR to improve Google Adwords Quality Score

Frank Rui Jiang — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:19:43 +0000

We all know that Keyword Quality Score in Google Adwords determines how relevant your keywords are to the advertisement, and the secret of achieving maximum quality score has never been fully revealed. Recently I’ve been testing the impact to quality score by *Click Through Rate* Vs. *Ads relevancy to keywords*, the campaign is targeting local entertainment business. In this case, all the paid search keywords are local keywords, so click through rate was pretty high.

Before show you the results, you may want to watch this video officially released by Google. This is an introduction of Google Ad Auction system by Google Chief Economist Hal Varian. After this video, you will have a better idea why CTR is so important to quality scores.

During first two weeks, I created 3 variations of ad copies for each ad group. All of them were including at least two main keywords and name of the town, so search engine users will find highlighted keywords when they search. I also chose to show ads with better performance rather than display evenly because I wanted to have high click through rate as soon as possible. Here were the campaign results for first two weeks:

As you can see, CTR was 5.67% for the overall campaign. Not too bad huh? With above 5% click thru rate, really relevant keywords to the ads, and there were only 6 of total 1000+ keywords reached maximum quality score of 10. The most of the rest were 7, so you may think it is the time to improve the relevancy of landing page? Not yet, according to Google Ad Auction video, we know that quality score is highly dependent on CTR (contribute nearly 60%) and landing page only contributes 10%. This makes perfect sense, as higher CTR means visitors prefer your ads and more clicks can generate more revenue to Google.

I created a new ad copy and put it into all the ad groups, this ad was more about what benefits people can get rather than *keyword relevance* and I switched ad displaying option to be showing evenly so that it could compete with other 3 keywords related ads. Guess what, after another two weeks, I had to remove at least 2 of 3 keywords related ads because they were so outperformed by the new ad copy. The campaign results of last 7 days were: (click through rate was nearly tripled)

And most importantly, the number of keywords with quality score of 10 became 108, remember I had only 6 in the first two weeks?

So here are the tips to increase your Google Adwords Click Through Rate from my experience

- Target very specific keywords, most of my keywords contains three words.

- Don’t use broad match unless you have time and money to reach maximum amount of audiences.

- If you do local business, add town name in every keyword.

- You don’t have to spend loads of time on tweaking your landing page.

- You do have to spend large amount of time to think, create, test and monitor your ad copies.

- Always use *display evenly* option to show your ads.

- Don’t design ad copies for your keywords, design for your customers, think what benefits you can offer. (Btw, sometimes if your ad contains a keyword too many times, i.e. highlights 3-4 times in your ad copy, it actually looks spammy)

- Use Google Analytics to check what people exactly search, and eliminate as many unnecessary keywords as you can, such as “suck”. (i.e. negative keywords)

What’s your experience on improving adwords click through rate? Please share your mind here

Web User Experience Lesson From Gordon Ramsay’s TV Program

Frank Rui Jiang — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:51:35 +0000

I am a big believer in “SEO is nothing without providing decent user experience to your visitors“. Imagine you ranked as #1 for many popular keywords, but your website is crap and people who enter your website cannot find what they want, they will definitely go away and never come back again.

Well, you must be curious how the hell I could learn website user experience from Gordon Ramsay’s TV Progam: Kitchen Nightmares. Before I tell you the full story, please let me quickly introduce this TV program to readers who have never watched it. Each episode of Kitchen Nightmares was about how Chef Gordon Ramsay helped a desperate restaurant and saved them from closing. I watched several episodes of Kitchen Nightmares during Christmas (check out my Xmas seo posts collection) because I simply love food and cooking. What surprised me was that running a restaurant was amazingly similar to running a website, and below are the lessons I learnt from this TV program.

Lesson #1 – You need to offer good food to let customers come back again

You don’t need to be super expert in SEO industry (or any others), but you have to deliver decent quality content so that your visitors might visit you again. In Kitchen Nightmares, no doubt that customers would be sick of disgusting food and leave. Same in world of web 2.0, your bad content is going to 100% drive people away.

Lesson #2 – Don’t offer services you are not capable of

In Kitchen Nightmares, a guy opened a restaurant in Spain and had 72 dishes on the menu, even including Chinese food, and he was cooking on his own. Even Gordon Ramsay admitted he could not do this, how could this guy? So concentrate on what you are capable of, if you have a small SEO agency, don’t try to pick up on everything such as PPC, Social Media, Affiliate Marketing, Email Marketing…etc.

Lesson #3 – Don’t give customers too many choices on the menu

An indian restaurant owner had his menu fully flexible to customers, it meant you could choose whatever sources you want to make your very own curry (more than hundreds of combinations). Sounds interesting isn’t it? But in reality, that decision ruined his kitchen and entire service, because people had no idea what flavor they would get. On your website, don’t give visitors any chance to mess your service up. For example, I want to SEO for page A, C, E, Google adwords for page B and D, MSN adcenter for page F, social network for A and B, affiliate marketing for D, flash banner for A and C….etc. Say NO to me.

Lesson #4 – Environment and atmosphere matter

Back to the guy who owned a restaurant in Spain, he had a dog, and Gordon Ramsay found dog sh*t several times in dinning room and kitchen was filthy. How the hell could anyone eat in a restaurant like that? And atmosphere, at a english pub in Lancashire, the old couples who owned pub always weared formal suits… They apparently had no idea what a traditional pub would be like. On your website, design is very important, don’t be dodgy and ugly. Also encourage relevant comments as this is atmosphere on your site.

Lesson #5 – Don’t serve dead seafood

A restaurant based in Brighton, was only about 50 meters away from seashore, and they served opened mussels (means dead) to customers, unforgiveable. Don’t post SEO news from 2006, they are *dead* and nobody wants to see them unless you have really good reason.

Lesson #6 – Never ever shout at your customers

An ex-boxer and his wife opened a pub somewhere in Wales (cannot remember the place lol). They cooked crap food and even worse, they shouted at customers who dared to complain about the service. Nothing was worse than shouting at customers, the consequence was obvious, they never ever came back. On your blog, or your website, discuss with visitors who have different opinions, don’t argue and never ever shout at them.

Lesson #7 – Let it go if your employees can do better jobs

The old couple owned a pub in Lancashire, the husband was 62 and was cooking for 30 years. He couldn’t remember things clearly and his cooking speed was like a snail. Gordon Ramsay demonstrated that his employees could do much better job than him, so why not just let it go and relax? On your business site, if you find someone can do a better job, let him do it, it’s always great to have a hand to help you.

Lesson #8 – Do listen to expert

Gordon Ramsay is one of the most popular chefs on this planet (he is also good at business), if he is willing to help your restaurant, listen to him! Many times that restaurant owners refused to follow Ramsay’s advise, and things were only getting better once they could listen to Gordon Ramsay. If Darren Rowse wants to teach you how to blog, do what he says. If Rand Fishkin or Dan Thies are willing to give you SEO advise, do what you’re told. It’s not following them with blindness, you will learn a lot and be able to see the difference.

Have you ever got any seo lessons or any other lessons from *unrelated* things? Please share them here

By the way, Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares is quite good to watch.

A collection of Christmas SEO Posts

Frank Rui Jiang — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:45:12 +0000

First of all, I wish everyone has a wonderful holiday for Christmas and New Year. Instead of having turkey, I am going to write this entry with a collection of SEO posts that famous SEOers posted for Christmas 2009.

#1. Search Engine Land – Christmas ‘09 Logos From Google & Others

Barry Schwartz came up an idea of collecting Christmas logos from Google and other websites including Yahoo, Bing, Ask, Baidu and so on.

#2. SEOmoz – WhiteBEARD Friday

SEOmoz delivered this very special edition of “WhiteBEARD Friday – 12 Link Strategies of Searchmas”, you really cannot miss this, loooool hard at Rand Fishkin.

#3. Search Engine Watch – Happy Holidays to all from Search Engine Watch, ClickZ and SES.

Search Engine Watch had this post to thank friends and colleagues for the contribution.

#4. Search Engine Roundtable – Video recap of weekly search buzz: Christmas day 2009

Another video edition for search buzz around Christmas day.

#5. Search Engine Journey – SEO Christmas wishlist

Loren Baker made this list of 5 things he believes that can improve his standard of SEO life

#6. Marketing Pilgrim – Tracking Santa Claus for Christmas 2009

Google Map provides a living track of Santa Claus, really fun to have a look.

#7. David Naylor – The SEO Christmas Tree

This is absolutely brilliant in my opinion. Paul Carpenter posted this fantastic SEO Christmas tree.

What’s your SEO post for Christmas? Or you are too busy eating the turkey with your family? Why not share the link of your SEO post here.

Wordpress 2.9 is released

Frank Rui Jiang — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 00:25:38 +0000

Is there anything more interesting than reading changelog of the latest wordpress update? I guess the answer would be NO to wordpress fans. Wordpress just released its latest wordpress 2.9 update, which resolved more than 500 tickets and bugs.

So let’s have a look at its core updates

- “Undo” feature

No more hit the wall with you head when you accidentally deleted your work (even though wordpress would ask “are you sure?!” in previous versions). All the stuff you delete will go into “trash”, you can get any of them back whenever you want.

- Built-in Image Editor

This is really powerful and surprising, it does allow you to crop, rotate, flip and scale your photos, quite basic and yet very handy. Now, you don’t really have to open your photoshop again unless you are going to design some fancy looking graphs.

and then

- Multi plugins update and compatibility check

Basically means you don’t have to keep clicking when there are many updates available, they can be done at once. Also, new wordpress 2.9 will give you better idea of whether your plugins are compatible with new version or not, thereby you can make your decision wisely.

Tools->Upgrade

- Easier Video Embeds

You don’t need any code surrounding the video URL, just put URL in one line (nothing else in this line), only support for Youtube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, Polldaddy and wordpress.tv (likely to realse in wordpress 3.0).

Some other interesting changes.

- You can now use rel=canonical tag in default wordpress rather than install SEO plugins. It can prevent duplicated content issue, which is very critical to SEO.

- When you are editing files in the theme and plugin editors it remembers your location and takes you back to that line after you save.

More information about changelogs can be found on wordpress blog.

Personally I find out new Image Editor will be really handy, you don’t have to have photoshop on while you are writing your post, it really reduces a lot of memory usages. Rel=canonical will be extremely important for those who don’t understand SEO quite well and haven’t yet installed any SEO plugins, less chances for them to be punished by Google. For the trash function, it’s OK, but to be honest, I don’t think people will be silly enough to delete their work *accidentally* after seeing “Are you sure?” warning from Wordpress.

What do you think of wordpress 2.9 update? Share your thoughts here.