Bad weather, college work, blogs and fun times in London

All is well on my end. Nothing unusual exept i am still lying under a huge pile of college work, as much as that is so so so annoying. However, now the country has returned to its usual self by giving us rain again. Today it was horrendous. I. Hate. Rain. Just to let you all know that irrelevant fact.

Although i am looking forward to this weekend when i am going to London to meet up with some friends from my year abroad. It will be so much fun! I was only ever in the UK once and i was young, so going to London should be pretty good! Cannot wait to see all my friends from abroad again! :)

So...... we have been given the task in our e-Business class to follow certain blogs, so i am currently looking for potential candidates hahaha. Twenty Major became my first. I enjoy reading the posts on that blog :)

Anyway, back to work now - blog hunting!!

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is essentially the process of designing and updating a website so that it is likely to show up in organic listings for relevant user queries.

The basic idea of it is that there are 3 key things that need to be done carefully to ensure that your company appears in the organic listings of a search engine, e.g Google. These are:

1. Identify target key phrases

Hints to look for here would be the things potential customers would type in and also what queries have already been conducted

2. Include key phrases in the web page

However only include once only in these places: in the page title, in a heading, in regular text, and in bold text.

3. Get links to the site

Ideally, companies should aim to get links on many pages and from reputable sites with similar themes.

There are certain things that are considered as definite no-no's. These are:

- Avoid hidden or invisible text

- Do not do any keyword stuffing

- Do not page-jack

- Do not get involved in "link farming"

I find this area quite interesting as it is generally all about Google, as the biggest and most successful search engine. The actual topic content is good. It is quite useful to learn these things on this topic as i may need to undertake SEO one day!! At least now i know all about it and i found further reading on it too on Wikipedia (as reliable as ever).

We also learned about the so called "black listing". This is where companies under go certain things to try and get to number one on Google but they are caught out and are black listed for a certain time period. In this period, if a user types the company name into Google, no result will appear. I liked learning this because it is good to know what happens if you try and do the above mentioned no-no's.