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.

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

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

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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