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.

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

First off, I want to say thanks to SEOmoz (a very authoritative SEO blog) for holding this amazing SEO webinar. Though it was SEOmoz’s first ever webinar, but apparently it was really successful (SEOmoz had to add a second session due to overwhelming responses).  I missed first webinar session due to arrived home very late on 10th Dec. For the second session, which was few hours ago, I finally managed to get home early (6:45pm London), though was still late for first two chapters. This wrap-up is just for those who hasn’t got a chance to join this webinar and my note taking speed was not fast enough, I am sorry for any missed part.

seo tips from seomoz pro webinar

This link building strategies webinar covered following topics

What’s the easiest way to let search engines such as Google to crawl your website? The best SEO practice is to submit your website and sitemap of it to search engines. Yes, I know 99.9% of you know this basic knowledge. BUT, which sitemap format will you choose? HTML sitemap or XML sitemap?

Let’s see what Matt Cutts says on the video

If cannot see the video in the post, click here to watch.

Here I sum up Matt Cutts’ points

1. Google likes both HTML sitemap and XML sitemap
2. Google does not guarantee to crawl links from XML sitemap
3. HTML sitemap will definitely help Google to find links
4. Additionally,  Users prefer HTML sitemap (at least I do, I will show you later in this post)
5. If you can only create one sitemap, create HTML sitemap
6. If you can, do both HTML sitemap and XML sitemap

Well, I guess you know the answer already, maybe it varies for other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo. But if you wish your sitemap perform better in Google, you’d better create both, or at least HTML sitemap.

Plus, Mr.Google uses HTML sitemap as well, check it via http://www.google.com/sitemap.html

Do people really prefer HTML sitemap to XML sitemap?

I will showcase my website – seoblogmoney.com as an example.

Do you know you may miss some SEO opportunities to rank well for your targeting keyword because of wrong anchor text or even missing anchor text in existing inbound links?

People talk link building strategy every day, it’s an endless task to acquire inbound links, no matter it’s link baiting (bascially it costs a lot of time to create something useful), or social network profiles establishing (not very useful, especially if you don’t have time to get involved), or directories (you are more likely to pay for the good ones), or buying links (money + risk) or any other form of link building. Yes, it’s the most difficult part in SEO, and it’s unavoidable for most of the websites who want to rank better.

However, there are some companies who have good reputations, old websites with a bunch of quality inbound links already, and they are yet to know the great benefits of SEO link building implementations. One of my clients are amongst the companies I described above, they are very cautious of executing any SEO off-page optimisation and social network involvement due to the risk of damaging the reputation of their business. It’s understandable especially they are in the traditional industry, they haven’t got great knowledge about internet and if there is anything goes wrong, the impact would be disastrous. However, they still want to rank better for their keywords…

Due to restricted policy, I could not use my client as a perfect case study. The situation for them is, pretty much done all the SEO on-page optimasation, old domain with high authority, quite a few quality inbound links, and they are yet to decide to start link building or not, even though I proposed so many times with different ways to approach. So I tried proposed not to acquire new inbound links, but to optimise existing inbound links.

Here I randomly picked www.next.co.uk as an example (assume it does not want any further link building), and show step-by-step how I come up with this existing inbound links optimisation strategy.