Pub Quiz- Victory! and Meta Tags

Last night was a goodnight. At first I was just going to call it a night and head home after work because of the -15 C weather we are having in Beijing. However, thanks a series of about 20 emails in 30 minutes, I was entertained and felt the need to go to the Bookworm Pub Quiz with our awesome team of Cassie, Jasmine, Michael (the white American one), and Annie. Let me tell you, nothing truly inspires like a full inbox. And what an inspirational night it was!

Oh man was it worth it! Not only was Cassie in rare form which ensured tons of hilarity, but Annie was pumped, Jasmine was as always entertaining on the subway ride, and I just met Michael but he is good people! After perusing the menu and deciding on nothing, we settled in for the game.



So a quick summary:
Team Name: Little Miss Bossy (Cassie was wearing hte shirt and being so)
Team attitude: Pumped
Quiz Master: Shamus
Quiz Master Attitude: Mocking of us
Most offensive comment of the night: Calling Israel "those fuckers"
Most challenging question: What does Sv stand for when measuring Ocean Current? (Sverdrup)
Most entertaining team: Numbats, called Numbnuts by the quizmaster and continually heckled and failed to add correctly. if you can't count, you might not win the quiz...

Well, after a slow start we stormed into 3rd place and held battling between 3rd and 4th until the last round. This round was worth double and we were in spitting distance of 1st, but really, top 3 all win booze, so that's all that mattered. After holding strong we pulled out 13 points, and the two teams out in front hit 14, not one else broke 11. Clearly, we had 3rd place, it was exciting.

However, Shamus, the mocking Quiz Master (we had some outspoken Canadians and Americans, so yeah, what do you expect?) failed for the second time tonight (he had asked "why not invade Canada, you know, make it the 52 state?") and couldn't count. He declared at tie for 3rd place, when in fact the two teams he was talking about were neither tied nor in 3rd place. After a brief confusion, we established our rightful place, won some Tsingtao and headed home. Yeah, we rock. There is a victory video to come soon.


As always the ride home with Jasmine was highly entertaining. Sadly there was no talk about dating people with tails :-( but that is a conversation for another blog.

I'm going to go ahead and suggest the Monday night pub quiz at the Bookworm to all you Beijingers. Its a little brainy then most, but the crowd is rowdy and the place doesn't get smoky, a double whammy!


After that night, its right back to work this morning. As always, it starts with seeing what the buzz in the world of web design is. Today there was quite a bit that really irked me. I mean, I understand "optimizing" my website because it is in my job description, but really, I don't think of my job as Search Engine Optimization. Instead I think of it as making the website work. The goal is not to make the website appealing to Googlebot and other spiders, because really they can't buy anything! Instead, make it usable and friendly to the person on the other computer and while doing that, make sure it doesn't suck in a search engine. End User first, Google, Baidu, Yahoo!, Live, or whatever you use second.

For this reason, I found this article to be helpful in explaining what I mean:


It is a good article, and the first section hits it pretty well:

Search Engine Friendly Design

Developing your site to be "search engine friendly" is one aspect of SEO best practices. The idea is to simply design your site so that the visiting robot can read and take notes (or index) all relevant aspects of each page of your site.

If your site is designed poorly or doesn't have links to all of your pages, then the robot will bypass those pages and only report on what it sees. Designing your entire site with Flash or using images in place of text are great ways to be mostly "invisible" to search engines, because the robots can't accurately read Flash content or text embedded in an image (yet).

Its not saying to design your website for the Search Engines, just make sure they can use your site. After that I think it goes down hill quite a bit. I think if you want a better understanding of using the tags you should check out this article which gives a better idea of relative importance:



So with those thoughts in mind I decided to take a look at how I'm titling my blog and what labels I'm tossing on it. Given I don't have access to all the tags like I normally would, so this is just a test to see what happens. Currently I'm going through about 2,000 of these tags and its oh so fun and exciting! (if i seem cranky now you'll know why!)

Moral of the story, ignore the idiots who say design your website for a SERPs. Instead, make a great website and keep on top of what search engines want as you go, so you don't make someone go through and edit them all individually.

This brings me to my next point. Why is the Busby SEO Test asking for first place in Google? As a professional web development team, they would know that getting the user to the site is only half the battle. Wouldn't the Busby SEO Test be better to create a specific conversion task to measure the best SEO? I haven't thought too hard about what I would make the conversion goal because you don't want it to be something the designers can cheat on, but I'm sure you can create an error-proof conversion goal that would making any cheating trackable at least.

Luckily, I play polo inside

Been a while since I posted any good content. So here goes a brief update. First off, its really frigging' cold in Beijing, like -15 C cold. As in going outside is a great way to practice my Chinese cursing cold. Let me tell you I really miss Steve (my Prius) at times like this, when I'm walking outside for 15-30 minutes. But even with the cold, I've been braving the outside world to get stuff done.

First off, as I said, I've got water polo and its great. The team is to my knowledge the only team in Beijing. I am amazingly lucky to be training with them even if it is what it is. For me this means there is no English at practice and I miss most of the good practices. I generally get to the conditioning for about 10 hours a week and play for 4. They are together for 28-30hours a week. They are all pretty jacked and the only group of Chinese guys that I've seen walking around with 6 packs. To get an idea of what its like without giving away any of the Coaches methods, we get to tread water for 300M holding a 20Kg weight on a regular basis and they absolutely love 800's pull with paddles before busting out some swim sets, you know, like 400's fly. Oh and its long course... they are pretty phenomenal athletes.

The only problem with this whole thing is my knee. Normally a knee might look something like this:



the problem is, my knee looks more like this



Basically this isn't stopping me, but it means I spend a lot of time icing and it pain. As Russ so nicely informed me "Some people treat their bodies like a temple, you treat yours like an amusement park." Its true, but I do rather enjoy it.

Outside of water polo, I've been dealing with the revolving door that is Beijing. This means saying goodbye to friends who I've made and trying to make new ones. On a positive note, this can mean parties. We hosted a beer pong party which went rather well. It was a jolly good time with friends as me and the roommate put it together. It also meant getting to buy beer from the cute little girl again (technically her parents, I'm sure she would have cut me a better deal). However, it is fun to watch the network grow and shrink and shift and see how small Beijing really is, even when its so giant. Its a truly grand social experiment.

Recently I also visited 798, the art district, with some friends and saw some truly disturbing stuff and some that was pretty cool like this creepy many legged man




Also been spending some quality time just hanging out with the friends and girl. Christmas shopping a little (sorry for those of you in the states, but its not getting shipped now!) and relaxing. More on life in the next post


Sadly, I've got work most of the time. This has been going well. I've been doing more SEO and SEM related activities and less grunt work. I'm slowly starting to get better Chinese. The SEO work is always very interesting for me because its like a big game and seems somewhat like information awareness, something I studied for PWAD. Current I'm working on 3 of our websites as well as the Busby Web Solutions "World Cup 2" for SEO. What this means is that I'm trying to get a high ranking for the phrase Busby SEO Test. However, instead of just pouring myself into the contest I decided I'd try a different route. Quality content and some interesting materials with regular updates and nothing special. I don't plan on winning, but I think it will give me a better understand of creating novel content for Google from an SEO standpoint.

So to give you all at home an idea of what this means for just typing a blog I'll go over the basics. First, you select the keywords you are aiming for, in this case its chosen for me in the form of "Busby SEO Test." After that you want to create a webpage to utilize that word. Normally this involves creating title tags, meta tags, headers, back-links, and other practices. For the case of the blog it means putting relevant content up and making sure you are focused on your keyword. This is both from a density standpoint of the terms as well as pointing it in relevant places on the page itself in useful positions. If the phrase is sitting alone it won't be valued very well unless it is up in a header or title. It looks like you put it there for no reason other then SEO. You also don't want it too look like you are spamming the word. If I said Busby SEO Test 100 times in a row, the spider crawling for Google (Googlebot) would likely consider it spam.

The other beauty of writing this in blog form is that its writing for an audience. Often when people are designing new websites and trying to rank high in search engine rankings (SERPS) they forget that there is an end user. So I get to write for a person, even if I don't have a conversion goal. I'll give you more information on all this later. Back to other work for me. Oh and because I don't know what will happen as each post eventually moves off the front page, I'm going to post this one more time (its important to play by the rules with search engines)



Participant in the

Busby Web Solutions Search Engine Optimisation Challenge

Search Engine Contest

So since part of my job at my internship is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) I spend every morning reading about what's going on in the world of search engines. This means reading about techniques people use (black hat versus white hat), what's going on in the world of search engines (Google's growing market share, Baidu's lawsuits), and whatever else comes up in my various feeds. An interesting one popped up today, and that was Busby Web Solutions. When I looked onto the site I found out that the web development company is having a contest to see who can become number 1 in Google for their chosen term "Busby SEO Test". This peaked my attention, so I read on and took a look at what they're doing and what other sites are doing. I decided why not toss my blog into the game. It has been set to not appear in search engines until about 30 seconds ago. Why not see what some simple type and good content can do against people who are doing this for resumes, publicity, and money.

So Busby SEO Test, here I come.


Participant in the

Busby Web Solutions Search Engine Optimisation Challenge

Which also means a few other things. 1) If you follow this page because you follow me, this will have updates in it regarding this contest 2) if you follow this blog because its interesting or you're my friend and oyu have your own blog/webpage, toss me a link so other people will take a look 3)I'm going to update a lot more often about my life since I can now type my blog at work as work. Yay for updates! 4) you might learn something about Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) if you follow this.


So I'm going to go ahead and post this and leave fresh content for later today. Keep and eye for some posts and information soon.