March 2008

I have recently setup a new website, with a lot of SEO elements. This is the real first time of such a large project running SEO, which is a very good opportunity to test out how SEO affect the search ranking in the current search engine algorithms.

Those techniques I have used includes putting keywords in meta, and content, adding a lot of links under the Flash and image content. Also, as I made use of the wordpress engine, I am able to include many plugins like Google Analyticator, Google XML Sitemap generator, social networking links without pain.

I believe the result will come out in at least one month. I am so happy on working such a large project.

WomenPedia.hk - http://womenpedia.hk/

Having your blog posts spread across the Internet is the key to seeing an increase in your traffic and the awareness of your blog. Update services such as Technorati, Feedster and Xping for example, ping websites for the latest articles and publish them allowing many users to view your posts.For example, Technorati has a manual pinging service, which allows you to type in the address of a website and queue the ping. Once the queue has reached your query, Technorati will ping the address you entered and collect your latest information - this is great for increasing traffic and increasing your blogs awareness.

Wordpress offers a service under ‘Options’ -> ‘Writing’ in your Wordpress Admin Dashboard, where it automatically pings services. This means that each time you publish a new blog post, Wordpress will keep places such as Technorati up to date with your latest information. For example, if you go to ‘Options’ -> ‘Writing’ and you enter in ‘http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping’ in the text box right at the bottom of the page, Wordpress will ping Technorati each time you publish an article!

Recently, Yahoo! Hong Kong changed its search result interface, which is now the same as Yahoo! US. The change also includes update of search algorithm.

For instance, I found the ranking of two sites from my company has dropped. One from 2 to 3, small change, and the other from 8 to 15, out of the first page.

One weired thing is that in Yahoo! Hong Kong, the search result shows up some Korean websites, but the page only includes several Chinese keywords. This proves that the importance of keywords to the ranking is becoming less. At the same time, the content relevance to the search phrases are becoming less as well.

Instead, the importance of two elements has been increased, first in-links and second pages in the same domain. My guess is Yahoo! will also analyze the in-links’ content to see how relevance are they to the search phrases. This is yet to be discovered.

According to many articles, search engines especially Yahoo! and Google are always looking to rank the contents more meaningful and relevant. So, it makes sense if they do care about the references, and the corresponding content.

http://www.icanlearn.hk/
http://www.icanmake.hk/

I am currently running an advertisement ad on Facebook, when I started to see quite a lot ads from Hong Kong displayed on Facebook.

With the experience I had on Yahoo and Google Advertisements, it is quite different to advertise on Facebook. There are several reasons:

1. Facebook has a lot of user information, such as geographical, age, sex, hobbies, and many other preferences.
2. Facebook have two types of payment, CPC (Cost per click) and CPM (Cost per impression).
3. Facebook displays ads based on area and age, and may be other factors, which I am still investigating.
4. Facebook displays its statistics in quite real-time manner. You will see the statistics updated every few minutes.
5. Facebook only has one advertisement banner in one campaign.

There are also some similarities:

1. Facebook also allows you to bid the display probabilities, but what price is good is really depends.
2. Facebook allows you to set daily budget, which is between USD 5 to 250 per day.
3. The payment is through credit cards, mainly VISA or Master Card. It does not support American Express yet.
4. Facebook also suggests how much you can bid for a certain impressions or clicks. It also have statistics showing the average cost.

Facebook is still quite new in the Advertisement market. However, as the search engine cannot reach the internal part of Facebook, it is quite important to learn how to advertise through the Facebook platform. It will be the way to attract users from Facebook, especially the countries that has many Facebook addicts.

Reference:
http://searchengineland.com/071231-103853.php

http://www.allfacebook.com/category/advertising/

Just added two plugins to this site, which comes up with quite good.

The first one is Sociable, which is used to embed links to more than 60 social networking sites. Readers can easily click the configurable icons and bookmark in their favourite websites. The plugin is easily configurable through the Options -> Sociable, however, the drag-n-drop function seems causing javascript error.

Another plugin is the Google Analyticator, which simply add Google Analytics links to the header or footer to enable site traffic monitoring by Google Analytics. The plugin is not complicated, but really useful. The blog administrator no longer needs to add the javascript manually in every theme source.

It is the first time that I work on a plugin and really contribute to the WordPress World. It is really a good start.

With the help of Ronald Huereca, I learn how to use poEdit to localize wordpress component. What a great tool in translating, as easy as anyone knows how to use. As a return, I help to localize the Ajax Edit Comments Plugin to Traditional Chinese (my mother language)

Hope to do more on WordPress in the coming days, and I do also explore bbPress and see how to integrate them together. Combining both really provides a very good web solution.