SEO Coventry

SEO is such a big thing right now and everyone is talking about it. For those who are not aware, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It is one of the key web marketing activities and is defined as:

the process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines and importantly ensuring that external links to the site are correctly titled and in abundance. Source: Wikipedia.

Anyway, I was wondering whether there are any good companies specialised in SEO in Coventry and was quite surprised to find that in fact, there are none here in Coventry, apart from the National B2B Centre based at the University of Warwick. A search on Google for the search terms "SEO Coventry" also revealed that the companies in the top 5 results are based in Birmingham, London or elsewhere.

At a conference I recently attended, I was talking to some guys and they revealed that they did most of the SEO work in-house but their efforts were not effective and they have to consult some "SEO experts" from time to time, often at a huge cost. I was surprised at the amount that they were paying some of these so called experts.

Definitely puts some ideas into my head. I see a lot of opportunities for a Coventry based company or SEO Expert.

Hanlon’s Razor

This is my thought for the day:

You might want to ponder over it.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

or

Never attribute to conspiracy that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

My hybrid tea roses

Really nice colours



You can understand why Roses are my favourite flowers.


Join

Do visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Malaysian owned British companies

Malaysians are taking over the UK. I guess that might be a little bit of an exaggeration really but you might be surprised to learn the number of high profile companies which are actually owned by Malaysians/ Malaysian companies or in which they have a large share. Given below is a list of the companies:

1. Group Lotus Plc - Automobile / Sports cars / Engineering
Owned by Proton Holdings Berhad

2. Star Energy - Energy / Petroleum
Owned by Petronas

3. Wessex Water - Utilities / Water
Owned by YTL Corp

4. Laura Ashley Holdings Plc - Retail
Owned by Malayan United Industries (MUI) group

5. Jimmy Choo Ltd - Retail/ Shoes
Malaysian born Jimmy Choo owns 50% share

I am sure there are more but that's all I can think of for now.

Selamat Hari Raya 2008

This is the third time we are celebrating Hari Raya here in the UK. However, it's going to be a strange one this time. It's not a holiday which means that my kids will be going to school. My wife has an appointment with her supervisor as well.

This means that we won't be having an open house tomorrow. However, that won't stop us from visiting some of our friends' houses. Looking forward to eating some good home cooked Malaysian food.

Wishing everyone

Selamat Hari Raya Aidil Fitri
Maaf Zahir Batin

Importance of thinking positive

Just finished helping out at our office, packing bags for the new PhD students who are about to start their new life here are the Warwick Business School.

Anyway, this has been a fabulous week. First of all the weather was mostly great - bright and sunny.

The week started of quite slow and I was busy with a temporary web design job. Quite boring as all I had to do create several pages with lots of text and interlink each other but I made some good money.

Then on Thursday I attended the E-Business 2008 conference organised by the National B2B Centre based at The University of Warwick. Learnt a lot of new things which I am already putting into practice. Highlight of the conference was meeting "eMarketing Guru" Dave Chaffey. It is always nice to talk to the author of books you have been using.

Then on Friday, I attended the Introductory Workshop for Tutors in the Humanities, led by Mary Johnson (ex-Head of Learning at the Royal Shakespeare Company). It was an amazing experience. It introduced me to different ways of teaching. Some of the things I learnt included amongst others, the significance of space, movement and vocal quality. We even had to act out a small part from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Another important thing covered in the course was the issue of self-esteem. Mary used a simple experiment to show the importance of eliminating negative self talk. Saying positive things to ourself can do wonders. In the evening I had the chance to see the effects. I was in a bad mood because of something and I remembered the stuff I had learnt earlier. Eliminating all the negative thought and talking positive to myself improved my mood almost instantaneously.

Yeah! It has been a great week and I hope it gets even better next week.

Caro Prangenberg the idiot

There's someone who calls himself Caro Prangenberg, who keeps leaving comments on my blog or should I say spamming. It's ok to comment but this guy is so lazy he just copies some sentences from one of my posts and pastes it to the comment. I am not sure what's he is hoping to gain by this. My guess is that he one of the guys employed by one of the SEO companies out there who pays people to go blog hopping and leave comments with a link back to their client's website.

They don't realise that sooner or latter, the websites are going to be blacklisted as spam origin sites.