dannytalk ™ A Danny Ng Blog

You may have read my previous entry on performing a 301 redirect from Blogger to Wordpress, where I wrote a script that will capture all traffic to your old Blogger site and redirect it to your new Wordpress site. Ideally you’d want to do the 301 redirects from the web server, but unfortunately Blogger doesn’t allow you to do that and thus, you’re left with the client-side solution: Javascript.

First of all, let me clarify briefly on my previous post and inform you what the core strengths of my script are.

• Client-side redirect will not work without Javascript. Pretty obvious huh? What that means is that search engine crawlers aren’t able to follow the redirect. Nasty limitation in a simplistic sense.
• Strengths of my script are:
  1. It works.
  2. You need a client-side solution if you’re on Blogger. No other way.
  3. It captures and redirects all traffic from your old site to your new site.

That being said, let me now expand on these two major points: the limitations of search engine crawlers and why is capturing traffic important.

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The 80/20 Rule

You may have heard of the common business principle of the 80/20 rule, such as 20% of employees do 80% of an organisation’s work, or 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. The list goes on.

Well, this post is meant to address the issue of “when is too much, too much”? How can we spend 20% of our SEO/Search Engine Optimisation efforts to achieve 80% of the result from a purely page optimisation perspective?

Why Organic Rankings and Traffic?

There are a lot of theories and ideas from various people on how to optimise a page to rank organically for search phrases and drive organic traffic on search engine results page (SERP). The value of organic rankings and traffic is that it does not cost you money as opposed to spending money on advertising to drive traffic and be seen for what user’s search for (such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing).

So what does that mean? Imagine if your website is listed on the first page of Google’s SERP for the phrase “buy digital camera”, your traffic would be sky rocketing with an estimate average search volume of 135,000 (as reported by Google Adwords Keyword Tool) and thus, driving digital camera sales since the phrase shows the intent of the user, which is to “buy”.

And it hasn’t costed you anything in advertising.

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I just read an article from the BBC news about a riot by Jews during the Jewish holy day of atonement, Yom Kippur.

Apparently it was caused by an Arab man who drove his car during the religious holiday where there is fasting and much standstill among the Jews. So he was reported to have been attacked by youths because of his offensive act of driving on the streets.

What I don’t get is that people would go berserk over these things when it’s meant to be a holy period. Hello? Is rioting and expressing your anger seen as holy, or is even holy?

Ok, maybe the Arab guy might’ve been a tool and decided to take the piss out of Jews by driving his car during this period, but to pay back with rudeness and intimidation with anger and hostility, well I think most of them might’ve missed the point of the holiness of the event.

Holiness is to be set apart, to repay hostility with kindess, good with evil, and above all love with hatred. To do what goes against your sinful nature and to do what is right instead. Yes, it takes an active decision to be made holy and to do what is right rather than what feels right.

This is what the bible says and this is what I believe.

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I’m very upset at the Australian dollar plummeting in a blink of an eye. From reaching heights of US$0.98 in July to now closing just below US$0.68, the Australian dollar has lost 30% in value in under 3 months.

Imagine if you’ve invested $1 million into the US dollar few months ago and sold out now? You’d make the quickest $300,000 gross you’d ever imagine.

What does that mean for people like me? It means it is now more expensive to travel overseas and purchasing overseas goods. With the price of oil dropping to around US$90 per barrel, I haven’t noticed any drastic changes in local petrol prices and also airfares. That really sucks as I’m planning to travel overseas early next year.

I’m sure there’s news all over with blazing headlines on how the global markets are following the US path as confidence of investors spiral downwards and selling off whatever they can to salvage what’s left.

Sure you’ve heard of all the sweet news of the US government bailing out companies such as Freddy Mac, Fannie Mae and AIG. I suppose this is to impart confidence into investors to not go into a selling frenzy and add further momentum to the downward freight train.

Rumours have emerged that Richard Fuld, Lehmann Brothers’ CEO tipped the economic landslide with the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers. But I guess he has no problems with his healthy $300 million in bonuses over the last 8 years. Apparently he feels horrible.

Yet despite these events, Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet’s company, has bought a $5 billion stake in Goldman Sachs, another ailing investment bank.

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