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The Search Engine Optimization Question

Google - The hands down SEO standard for years.

Google - The hands down SEO standard for years.

Question:

“Can you optimize (my client’s web site) for search engines, and how much would that cost?  I have done all that I can do on my end with meta tags and index page text. This is out of my league.   You’re the Guru– Thanks so much.”

Answer:

Any SEO project ought to elicit client expectations, available options, and possible compromises to define the success of the project from the get-go.  There are well-known best practices and strategies and Google has published considerable information in the webmaster tools and help center http://tinyurl.com/29mjbn.

When designing and implementing a sales purpose website, I follow a check list approach, or when picking up an existing site I apply the checklist as best as I can working within the site’s design sensibility.  Usually, mere site modifications do not satisfy the grandiose and unrealistic expectations of most people, however, who lack sufficient understanding of the how where and why of coming up in Google’s search engine results.  Google search engine results are purely algorithmic, but the up shot is there is no way to cheat Google.   There is a lot of competition for known search words like “art” “gallery” and “park city” or whatever happens to be in the collective zeitgeist of the day.

A basic education in how search engines work often ensues, followed by various online marketing strategies and the latest social networking tactics, which leads you very often back to how advertising itself works.  It can get pretty hairy.

Conclusion:  There are two components to estimating SEO the technical part, which I can easily estimate, and the strategic part, which I can not so easily estimate.

Posted in Hosting, SDLC. Tagged with , , .

By derek
August 25, 2009

No comments

Automating the process of web site development

Developing a web site is a very personal matter, either at the individual or organizational level.  At Immediate Tech Support, our aim is to provide support to the end user and facilitate the process of creating an online prescence without it turning into an unweildy affair.  Our process of providing theme-based content management systems for web sites and e-commerce sites allow our customers to go with their own design and to manage the content themselves freeing up the process to one that is more efficient and manageable.  Contact us at web@itsimmediate.com to find out more about our web prescence solutions today!

Posted in Design, Hosting.

By derek
August 10, 2009

No comments

The Book IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

 

This book about IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence by Dan Volitich is the undisputed official guide for IBM Cognos out there, widely thought to be the best book on the software system, it also happens to be a very worthy discussion of Business Intelligence in its own right.

In the very first chapter, Volitich launches right in to a discussion of Performance Management, what is it, and how to use it in business.

Posted in BI. Tagged with .

By derek
May 20, 2009

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I recommend Updating to Wordpress 2.7.1

After upgrading to 2.7.1 Wordpress, there are so many new and useful features, such as support for Google Gears, one-click upgrade, and Press This, not to mention fixing some 60 outstanding tickets, I have to say I highly recommend upgrading if you haven’t.  It isn’t difficult, I thought it would be a PITA but it wasn’t bad.

I just successfully upgraded one of my other blogs to Wordpress 2.7.1 and the admin console looks great.  I do recommend checking out this Guide for upgrading Word Press, but here are the simple steps I took to do this upgrade:

1.  ignored the warning to backup the existing installation

2.  deleted wp-admin and wp-includes

3.  uploaded the new files choosing the option to overwrite if file source is newer in FileZilla.

When I first accessed the blog, I saw a flash in the address bar that indicated an upgrade was occurring, but it was so quick if I had blinked I would have missed it.

When logging in to the admin console, I was a greeted with a notice screen a database upgrade would be required.  I pressed OK and the upgrade occurred in less than one second.

Also, just a quick note about blogging, I’ve been loving Friendfeed.  Also, I’ve been loving LiveWriter from Microsoft, this tool allows me to publish to three different blogs quickly and easily and I really enjoy the del.icio.us tags feature!   These tags are inserted and click directly to the tastiest del.icio.us tags!

del.icio.us Tags: ,

Posted in Hosting.

By derek
May 15, 2009

1 comment

A Webstats redirect page for AWStats on Windows Server

This week installed awstats open source for about 15 websites I host on a Windows 2003 Server.  The webstats interface from awstats seems to accomplish everything the customers we have would expect, and I was able to specify different logos as needed, allowing me to distinguish between ourselves and our creative partner, FRC Design. 

The basic requirements on windows were ActiveState, on this server I installed both x64 bit and x32 bit it didn’t seem to mind.

In order to install the software it was important to get particular instructions for installing on Windows.  Yes, the advanced settings for w3svc logs are essential, and it appears AWStats does not work without making these changes, but once I was able to do it for one, I could copy relatively easily seeing the pattern.  For future reference it will be helpful to export the website settings and then create new websites from file.  I just learned this the hard way because a budding retail web site just requested to be added on and I had to redo everything by hand.

I couldn’t install a subdomain for every site, so In order to avoid having to do multiple installations of awstats, I created a /webstats subdirectory with one size fits all scripting solution, which basically split the domain name into prefix, word and suffix, redirects if the prefix is not www and then redirects to awstats conf qstring variable passed into the .pl script.

To keep everything running, I just scheduled a job to run every hour and update from the logs.

 

Listing 1.)  default.asp

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Webstats Redirect Page</TITLE>
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="TextPad 4.6">
<META NAME="Author" CONTENT="Derek Lords">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="Webstats redirect">
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="grab the domain name and redirect to the correct webstats page">
<SCRIPT>
<%
Dim strDomainName, strDomainWords, strDomainWord, strDomainPrefix, strDomainSuffix
strDomainName = Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME")
strDomainWords = Split(strDomainName, ".")
strDomainPrefix = strDomainWords(0)
if strDomainPrefix <> "www" then
response.redirect("http://www." + strDomainName + "/webstats" )
end if
strDomainName = strDomainWords(1) + "." + strDomainWords(2)
strDomainSuffix = strDomainWords(2)
%>
</SCRIPT>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" TEXT="#000000" LINK="#FF0000" VLINK="#800000" ALINK="#FF00FF" BACKGROUND="?">
You are now being redirected to webstats. <a href="http://stats.immediatepro.com/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=<%= strDomainName %>">Please press here if you have not been redirected in 30 seconds.</a>
<% Response.Redirect("http://stats.immediatepro.com/cgi-bin/awstats.pl?config=" & strDomainName) %>

</BODY>
</HTML>

Posted in Hosting.

By derek
November 22, 2008

No comments

[Deitte.com] Finally Updated: Embedding HTML in a Flex application using an IFrame

I’ve updated to Flex 2 the code by Christophe Coenraets for embedding HTML in a Flex application using an iframe.

You can see a demo of it here.

You can download the code here.

To run locally, first compile IFrameDemo.mxml. If you are using Flex Builder, unclick “Generate HTML wrapper file” in the Flex Compiler settings before publishing, since there is an existing HTML wrapper. After this, you can view IFrameDemo.html. If you get a “Security sandbox violation” error, you need to put the IFrameDemo directory in the local-trusted sandbox. See the Flex documentation for information on updating FlashPlayerTrust files.

The one cause for limitations in this code is the use of opaque for wmode. I’ve seen reports of tabbing problems in the player, and running more than one player when using opaque wmode seems to degrade performance.

I had previously updated Christophe’s code twice for Flex betas. The two posts (which are here and here) have been very popular, and I’m happy to finally be able to update this code to Flex final.

This update also includes minor improvements to the code for readability and polish.

Update: if you’d like to share your own experiences with HTML in Flex or read what others have to say, see my new post on this.

Update 2: see this post for an update to the code that allows multiple HTML pages to be referenced at once.

Update 3: see this post for an update to the code that needs less HTML changes, allows multiple HTML pages to be referenced at once, and controls the HTML visibility as needed.

http://www.deitte.com/archives/2006/08/finally_updated.htm

–
Derek Lords
P: 212.227.6203
M: 917.579.2367
F: 917.591.2587

Posted in Frameworks.

By derek
April 30, 2008

No comments

Immediate Benefits From The Manifestation Wheel Workshop

At Immediate Technology Support, Projects are what we do. That’s why
I am constantly investigating the software development life cycle from
every angle. We’re coming to understand information has a life of its
own. At Immediate Technology we bring life to the information in your
business. “Immediate Technology”. It’s in the moment.

“It’s been a week since the Manifestation Wheel workshop and the
energy is still going strong. It’s already changed my approach to
work. Yesterday the managing director called me in to talk about a
project and said she needed a prototype in 2 days. It didn’t seem
like enough time, and after the meeting I felt like the managing
director was risking everything at my expense. I used the technique
you taught us for focusing on what wants to happen instead of forcing
things to create a prototype on time and that shift opened a whole new
atmosphere around creating the project. A new strategy emerged that
not only works, but turned out to be much more exciting than the
original expectation.
I still have a lot of inner work to do with the Manifestation Wheel,
but I know it is the right tool for me. I felt handcuffed by
circumstances before, and now the handcuffs are gone and productivity
is soaring.”
—Derek Lords, software developer

–
Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com

Posted in SDLC.

By derek
April 11, 2008

No comments

REMS Use Cases – Project Login

Basic scenario:
The user loads the rems url. The system failure to authenticate and loads the login screen. The user enters a project name and secret password. The system positive to authenticate and loads the project landing screen.

Unknown project or password scenario:
The user enters an unknown project or a known project and incorrect secret password. The system displays the password reminder screen.
–
Derek Lords
p. 917-579-2367
f. 501-631-3817
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted in Masterminding.

By derek
March 29, 2008

No comments

Flex Data Services Fails To Deliver Real-Time Business Intelligence

Flex with with traditional Flex Data Services does not stack up as a Real Time Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT). Some popular BIRT’s on the market now are found here: bi software information. In particular I was given a heads up today by our Vice President here at NYX a question would be coming my way to evaluate Flex as a replacement for Brio, which is currently a BIRT that has not been satisfying and is slated for replacement by something better. Could Flex be the right choice? In this article, I’ll try and do a comparison of the two and show why the traditional approach to targeting the flash runtime with Flex will not do for a real-time BIRT solution.

T first thing is to point out is the Flex API is just a presentation layer. As a presentation layer technology, Flex does not support direct access to databases. This may sound like a disadvantage but in practice it is not. In well-designed applications, the presentation layer (the user interface) is separated from the business layer containing the functionality or business rules of the applications and the data storage. Traditionally, Flex Data Services enables Flex and Flash to interact with Web Services, HTTP Services, and Remote Objects.

A web service supports machine-to-machine interaction over a network through an interface described in a machine-processable format called WSDL. Other systems interact with the web service in a manner prescribed by its wsdl description.

An Http service is a simple servlet that handles http requests to a URL and responds with XML data, which flex can handle in an object-oriented way.

A remote objects is a data object in the Flex applications classpath. It’s important to note this could be rendered by any platform, including the .NET Framework and not just Java.

As was mentioned previously, the best practice in software design is to separate the presentation layer from the business layer to facilitate agile development process. The Flex API dominates other API’s in this regard, but also promises any distributed application browser transcendence. Also, with Flex Builder 3 distributed applications become desktop applications when they are built on the Adobe AIR API. Customers are now expecting a more attractive and sophisticated look and feel, faster delivery, and less fuss with cross-browser compatibility made possible by targeting the Flash runtime and the less known but also very powerful AIR runtime for desktop applications.

Despite all these advantages, the methods of accessing data in flex have a common shortcoming since they all represent asynchronous and disconnected interaction between the presentation layer in Flex and the business layer. This disadvantage clearly disqualifies Flex Data Services as a possible solution for any real-time business intelligence reporting tool. Any enterprise dashboards for these sorts of systems won’t stand up to a real-time BIRT tool like Brio even if the client-facing components are so much less appealing and difficult to implement.

We’ll find out if the latest generation of data services from Adobe can save the Flash runtime environment from its disconnected, asynchronous shortcoming in the next article, which discusses that technology. But first, as promised, let’s take a closer look at Brio Reports.

This site, a company in McLean Virginia who runs the google words “REPLACE BRIO REPORTS” may serve to show real-time messaging protocols we’re about to discuss in the next article are not only a cool idea, but they’re being put into practice right now in many industries, particularly in the financial industry. The demand for these types of products is growing. It’s exciting to be working in this area.

Also, this tutorial published on Josh’s blog in the last 56 minutes also shows developers are actively pursuing Building a LiveCycle Data Service Application with Spring and Hibernate.

Posted in BI, Flash, Frameworks, SDLC.

By derek
December 18, 2007

No comments

Animator vs. Animation – Attack of the Clones

As featured on deviantArt – reminiscent of the fighting ninja matchstick people.

Very cool! Good ending. The “Opening the Library” scene was imaginative!

Click here to view this page in deviantArt

Posted in Flash.

By derek
June 18, 2007

No comments