A night out with sis

I don't usually do this but last night my sister took me to a nightclub! It wasn't that packed, which was good. I must admit to being a little bit tipsy. Got the giggles quite a lot. Expensive night! Cocktails for us both. Met a couple of nice guys but we left early as I had to work today.

Real estate spammers

I scanned my inbox and found Iain's email! He is a really good friend of mine from Scotland I used to work for in Leeds, in the north of England.

He said: "Hi Pun, Glad you've settled in and have a new office. Wishing you well. As to your problem, people these days understand the significance of the domain name when registering a site. It's given far too much weight, especially in MSN and Yahoo, but even Google has fallen into the trap. It's all got a bit out of hand, with hyphenated domain names springing up all over the place to take advantage of the loophole in search engine algorithms. I've looked at the first few sites for you. The #1 has few backlinks and only has a Google PageRank of 2. They've got to that position purely on domain name, I'm sure. The #2 has double the backlinks but has inbounds from another five sites belonging to the same owner; all linked together; all with keyword spamming SEO tactics. Highly black hat. #3 looks reputable. Been going a long while and has a shed load of backlinks. Corporate site. It would be difficult to compete on this one. But the two above? They both employ keyword spamming techniques; the second one is highly dubious and is spamming the engines. They've duplicated entire websites. Not sure where you go with this though. I don't believe the search engines will listen to you. Maybe Matt Cutts? SEO forums? Cheers, Iain"

Contacting a friend in Leeds

My sister can be so sweet sometimes. She's sent over a lovely bunch of flowers and has offered to take me out dancing later. Sometimes we don't see eye to eye but I love her. She's my sister! Still worrying about this job! I was only given it earlier this afternoon and I don't know what to do! Yes, I do, I'll email my friend in Leeds. He'll know what's what!

Domain names and Google's curse!

Mmm, this not going to be as easy as I thought! My task is to get a real estate agent's site onto the first page of Google. I'll advise him to use bangkok property after I looked up the suggestion tool for the best keywords. I have taken a long look at the top five on Google. Why does the top site only have 415 backlinks? Maybe they're quality links? Anyway, whatever, but all five, except one, has bangkok property keywords in the domain name! Strange, as anyone can buy a keyword domain name to trick Google. My client is a corporate. How can they use a keyword as their website name? Does this make any sense to anyone? How do SEMs possibly compete in this market?

Visit from my sis

My sister has just dropped into the office. She says it's very beautiful and kissed me on the cheek after she finished her tour!

Top SEO job!

You'll never guess what? I landed the job! Up until now I have had some very good clients but for some of the smaller sites, they don't really understand what I'm doing to help them. This one is way out there! And big! One of the top real estate agents in Bangkok has asked me, Pun, to take on their SEO. Unbelievable! He asked me a few questions about how I was going to approach it, which he agreed with, and I answered as knowledgeably as I could. He then said, "Okay, the job's yours if you want it. How long will it take to research and deliver a report?" I said I could have something for him in a couple of days or so. I'll make this a priority this afternoon once I've stopped pinching myself!

Networking in Bangkok

As I haven't got a site of my own yet, networking is one of the best ways to meet people and exchange contacts. They don't always work and sometimes they can be so very dry! But not last night! I met this really nice guy who I spoke to for ages. About anything and everything. At the end of the evening he said to call him tomorrow. He's the boss of a really big real estate company here and he wants me, yes me, to take a look at his site! It's just turned afternoon and I am taking deep breaths to calm myself down. I'll call him after lunch.