Don't Forget Baidu Search Engine

There are thousands of books teaching the SEO techniques and giving the instruction on how the submit your website URL to different Search Engines, however there is one Search Engine which most of the books missed out. Baidu Search Engine is the most popular search engine in the China Market, maybe the search volume is even higher than Google.
If your Website has Chinese contents or would like to make Chinese people as your target Audience, remember to submit your site URL to the following linke
http://www.baidu.com/search/url_submit.html

Find the Right Keywords for your page

Sometimes, no matter how hard you tried to optimized your site for certain keywords, it just does not give you any good ranking. As shown in the Keywords Monitor report. You will find that the keyword "investment" does not perform well, even though you have filled the page with the keyword. The reason is that the keyword has already highly optimized by some other powerful sites.

Instead of wasting time on the keyword with no future, what you can do is finding the alternative keyword with similar meaning and provides better chance. We add the keyword suggestion function to the keyword monitoring application. Click the "Suggest" link on on the right, it will pop up a small window showing you 20 possible keywords alternatives, you may adopt for your page SEO. For the example above, the possible alternative keywords for "investment " could be

We will also show the current ranking for this keywords for your site in the Search Engine as a reference. In the above example the best alternative "Investment" maybe "Investment advice". The current ranking in Google for your site is 15. With some more SEO effort, you can easily move the this new keywords alternative, to higher ranking in the Search Engine.

How to add SiteCatalyst Code in Joomla

There are more and more companies move their platforms to the open source CMS Joomla. At the same time they need to migrate their Omniture SiteCatalyst tracking code to Joomla platform as well. Joomla is good, however as most of the open source system, the development documentation for Joomla is limited. Here I share some PHP code and SiteCatalyst tracking code to show how can you add the tracking code into the Joomla Template and generate the PageName dynamically.

You just need the add the follow code into the Template index.php file.

global $mainframe;

// Get the PathWay object from the application
$pathway =& $mainframe->getPathway();
$items = $pathway->getPathWay();


$PagePath="MainPage";
$count = count($items);
for ($i = 0; $i < $count; $i ++)
{
$items[$i]->name = stripslashes(htmlspecialchars($items[$i]->name));
//echo $items[$i]->name;
$PagePath=$PagePath.":".$items[$i]->name;


}
echo $PagePath;

?>

What Can SEO Monitor Do for You

SEO is not one time project to fill up your site with keywords, thousands of sites are competing with you for the same keywords. What you need to do is monitoring the performance of the keywords to make sure that all of them bring your site to the top ranking.
SEO Monitor is a centralized SEO Automation tools, which offers the solution to monitor and analyze your keywords performance on the daily basis.

You can analyze the keywords with the following functions.
Update Ranking: You can update all your keywords rankings on the Search Engines you picked at one click.

Change: The system will update you on the ranking as well as the changes since last time. Pay attention to the keywords which have dramatic change.

Density Scan: If the keywords ranking are not good, probaly the keywords are not emphasis enough on the site. you'd better run the Density Scan to check the keywords density on your site.

Difficulty Analysis: If the keywords' ranking are still poor, even though you have done everything with your site, it's probably because your competitors have done even a better job and they have done it for a long time. Difficult Analysis will show you how the Top five ranking sites have optimized the keywords. You can either follow them or give up the keywords and pick a less competitive one.

Download: Finally, if you find the data useful, you can always download the ranking data into the CSV format and feel free to import the data into other system for different purpose.

Wonderful SEO Tools

There are quite a few of tools for SEM, but I seldom find good tools for SEO. Recently there is a website http://www.es3o.com/ this site provides quite a few of useful tools for the webmasters to check the keywords ranking of their websites. Currently available tools including.

• Rank Checker: Which webmasters can check the keywords ranking on the multiple search engines at one time.


• There is also a module SEO Monitor, which I found it quite userful, the function included Ranking Update: Just one click, you can update the ranking of all your keywords from the search engines you picked.
  Ranking Alert: If you don't have time to login and check you ranking, the tools will check it for you regularly. it will send you alert email if there is dramatic changes in the ranking of the keywords you are monitoring.
  Density Analysis: Have you done a good job on optimized your website for the keywords you selected. The tools will scan you website for the emphasis of the keywords on different locations. Based on the result, you will know where to improve your Site SEO.

Currently all the tools in the website is totally free. Worth to give it a try.

PHP Notice: Use of undefined constant

When I moved my PHP code from development to production, I encountered the follow message.

Notice: Use of undefined constant abc.

It doesn't affect the nomral operation of the function, but made my website looks pretty ugly.
It's because I used the array like item[apple] inside my php program. The solution for the problem is very simple. Just need to quote the key of the array something like. item['apple'] or item["apple"]. Then the Notice warning will not show and give you a nice and clear result page.

Undefined http_get function call in XAMPP

I am developing some web application using XAMPP as the development platform. In one of the function, I got the error, "Undefined http_get() function call". I know it's because the missing of the php_http.dll, so I add the file back into the "ext" directory and uncommented the extension=php_http.dll statement in the php.ini file under the php folder. However, with all the work I done, still the error message keep showing in the browser.

Finally I figure out why, acutally in the folder of Apache, there is also a php.ini file. you need to uncomment the extension=php_http.dll inside there as well. Otherwise no matter what you change in the php folder, the webserver just read the older versionof the file and nothing change.

A small trick, it really took me 2 days to figure out. Time is wasted just like that.

How to do SEO using Omniture SiteCatalyst

Compare to SEM, which is expensive and involve a lot of fraud clicks, SEO is such a important thing for the websites, it's free, it's effective. If you do it right, it bring tons of quality traffic to your site next day. I have the expeirence that I optimized one of my landing page with a suitable keywords, which make me rank No.6 in Yahoo Search Engine for that keyword. Just with this keyword, it double the traffic to my site in the last few days. I hope this increase in traffic will be permanent.

There are a lot of tips on the internet or from SEO consultants on how to optimize your websites. Most common idea is put the keywords on Title, Keyword Meta tag and etc. That's only technical part of the SEO process.

The key for SEO is find the right KEYWORDS for the right pages and then emphasis the keywords on each pages.
I use Omniture SiteCatalyst to dig out the valuable information.
1. SiteCatalyst will auto detect the Keywords which bring the traffic to your sites

2. Break down the Keywords by Pages. SiteCatalyst offers an amazing functions named correlation. Basically it can further breaks the keywords by different dimension, such as Pages, Search Engine, Marketing Campaign and etc. What you can do is break down the keywords by different pages, to see, what keywords is the most suitable one for each page.

3. Draw a Map between the Pages and the suitable kewords. Now you can use all kind of technique available in the internet to emphasis the keywords on the pages so that the search engine can recognize it quickly.

How to do the Flash Tracking in Omniture SiteCatalyst

Omniture SiteCatalyst is famous for ease of implement, once you manage the usage of 3 parameters prop, eVAr and even. Basically you can track all the actions on the websites.
SiteCatalyst 14.3 version provides very nice function to enable the user to keep track of the flash actions. The only difference is that you need to set the tracking code inside the ActionScript inside the Flash object, instead of the Javascript inside the html.

The official Omniture Actionscript Implemention Guide is a little bit confusing to understand. With some trial and error. I found the following step is the way to create the flash tracking.
1. Generate the Flash script in Omniture Admin Console->Code Manager
2. Download the file ActionSource.mxp from the Code Manager
3. Import the ActionSource.mxp into Flash CS environment using Flash Extention Manager
4. Drag the ActionScript Components into the stage
5. Create a button object as shown in the picture.

















6. Right Click on the empty stage and select Action.

7. In the Action Frame, insert the following code to initialized the the Omniture Connection object. This part is similar to the s_code.js file in java script.
/* Specify the Report Suite ID(s) to track here */

s.account = "testreportsuite";

/* You may add or alter any code config here - see documentation for more

variables */

s.pageName = "ButtonFlash";

s.pageURL = "";

s.charSet = "UTF-8";

s.currencyCode = "USD";

/* Turn on and configure ClickMap tracking here */

s.trackClickMap = true;

s.movieID = "test";

/* Turn on and configure debugging here */

s.debugTracking = true;

s.trackLocal = true;

/* WARNING: Changing any of the below variables will cause drastic changes

to how your visitor data is collected. Changes should only be made

when instructed to do so by your account manager.*/

s.dc ="112";

addChild(s);

}

configActionSource();


8. If you want to keep track of the button Click action you should use the function the event

function goHome(event:MouseEvent):void {

//Set Variables

s.pageName = "Some Page Name";

s.channel="";

s.prop1="";

s.track();

}

OMTRButton.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, goHome);

This will send the ominture paramter s.pagename to Omniture Server. You can cofigure any other tracking parameters using the similar methods.