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
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