My ColdFusion career began at Indiana University in 1997 in a required class for a Computer Information Systems degree. (I primarily ended up pursuing a CIS degree because JAVA counted as a foreign language requirement.) The class was Visual [...]]]> In honor of How I Got Started in Coldfusion day here is my story.

My ColdFusion career began at Indiana University in 1997 in a required class for a Computer Information Systems degree. (I primarily ended up pursuing a CIS degree because JAVA counted as a foreign language requirement.) The class was Visual Programming, and Visual Basic and Power Builder were the primary technologies covered. Cold Fusion 3.0 was thrown during the last week to demonstrate an emerging “web page” language.

I remember spending many nights in the computer lab trying to develop VB applications. Dropping  elements on a grid, lining everything up, and then double-clicking each element to add it’s code. Then waiting for everything to compile. The whole process was very painful.

Then the professor demonstrated Coldfusion! A simple login page in CF Studio. All the code was on a single page and logically flowed. I could understand what everything was doing immediately by just the names of the tags. And all you had to do was copy and paste a query from Access or MSSQL into a tag and you could display records directly on the page. Brilliant! I was sold.

It took me a couple years in the workforce before I could work in ColdFusion all the time and no ASP! I write a ton of queries and still simply paste them into a cfquery (of course adding cfqueryparams). I’m proud of what the groups I’ve been a part of have accomplished in ColdFusion. And I always compare new languages with the features and development speed of CF.

“The sites that do put a little bit more individual care and attention and work [...]]]> Listening to NPR this morning I heard an article that I confirmed something about Google’s search results that I have been suspecting for a while. Google is now giving greater rankings to sites that appeal to their human audience.

“The sites that do put a little bit more individual care and attention and work into the content of their site — whether it be a product description, or a blog post,” says Matt Cutts, Google’s lead engineer on the Panda update, “those are the ones that users tend to prefer a little bit more and appreciate.” – NPR.org (http://www.npr.org/2011/05/03/135809341/googles-search-tweak-puts-a-company-at-risk)

We have been preaching all along – if you build a Web site that people want to visit, Google will reward you with higher rankings. No tricks. Just provide an attractive site with quality content that is updated often.

We recommend creating an Internet headquarters. I place where you inform the world of your news through blogs, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. All your content in one place that is distributed through social media. But all of the information can be found at your headquarters.

We are finding that a WordPress site is perfect for a headquarters site. It’s a content management system and blog combined with a huge amount of plugins to do just about anything your want. If a plugin doesn’t exist, the WordPress API makes it easy to add custom features. Our clients who are using WordPress find it easy to keep the content on their site fresh.

Please contact us if you are interested refreshing your stale Web site with one that will rise you higher in Google’s rankings.

Last week Google released a bunch of new features to their Google Analytics product.  I check [...]]]> When we spend time trying to optimize a web site to increase traffic, I find the need to check how our optimizations are performing.  There are two tools that I am addicted to, Google Analytics and Clicky.

Last week Google released a bunch of new features to their Google Analytics product.  I check our sites analytics just about everyday.  It’s interesting to see who visited our site, where they linked in from, what pages they viewed, how long they stayed and other juicy info.  I haven’t had much time to play around with the new features, but I am looking forward to the new custom reporting.

Here is how Google(http://www.google.com/analytics/features.html) describes the new custom reporting feature:

“Create, save, and edit custom reports that present the information you want to see organized in the way you want to see it. A drag and drop interface lets you select the metrics you want and define multiple levels of sub-reports. Once created, each custom report is available for as long as you want it.”

However, I think the e-commerce tracking is by far the most profitable feature with Google Analytics.  Using Google Analytics we can determine which links, keywords, banner ads, Adwords or other sources generate the most revenue. We can also see what visitors are trying to look for and if they are finding what they are seeking.  Then we can tell the percentage of customers who bail during the checkout process and at what point.  All very cool stuff.  All this info helps us to work with our clients to make their websites generate more revenue.

While Google Analytics has very powerful reporting tools, I have to wait until tomorrow to see today’s traffic. Not so with Clicky.  With Clicky I can see reports of real time traffic as it happens.  I find myself checking in two or three times a day. They even have an iPhone optimized version for the hard core analytics addicts.  The reports are great and I can drill down and see the entire session of each vistor.  Very nice.

Each of these solutions require a little bit of javascript on each page.   If you are a client of Aslan, please let us know and we’ll be happy to set your site up for analytics.

Do something on your website that people will want to link to.  Create a compeling article, a glossary, top ten [...]]]> Building Page Importance

A good way to build up the importance of your website is to get other websites to link to you.  In doing so, here’s some tips:

Finding Quality One-Way Links is Best

Do something on your website that people will want to link to.  Create a compeling article, a glossary, top ten list, faq or make a free tool to help your customer base.  Spend a little time getting the word out on your new content.  Contact blog owners that discus similar stuff, post comments, talk in relevant forums.

Find High PageRank Websites That You Can Write On

Look for websites like blogs where you can post comments to someone’s article.  There’s tons of those sites but you want the 1 out of a hundred where the links back to your website are not marked as “nofollow”.

To help you see the nofollow links easily first get the GreaseMonkey Add-On for Firefox, then the nofollow display greasemonkey script. With this script enabled, all nofollow links in a page show up on a pink background.  This makes it very easy to see good links on a page that you may be able to add to.  The pages with less “followed” links will be stronger pages.Page importance is passed from the link page to you but is divided amongst all the links on the page, both external and internal.

Be creative in finding websites.  You can easily find blogs on lists like the do follow directory but I’d be afraid about using that too much.  Search engines already have the published lists of do follow sites.   They could at their discretion give less importance to these links across the board.  It’s a good idea to just put in the time to search for websites that may want to link to you or offer somewhere for you to put a link.

Don’t Overlook Backlink Anchor Text

I asked marketing expert and Mothers Jewlery specialist, Jeff Moriarty about the importance of backlink text.

If I’m going after the term Chicago Web Design, I assume the best thing to have in the link text is the term I’m going after.  But if I get a link that passes rank from a blog or profile, does that still have some importance?

<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Chicago Web Design</a>
<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Web Designer Guy</a>
<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Aslan Interactive</a>
<a href=”http://www.aslaninteractive.com”>Matt MacDougall</a>
<a href="http://www.aslaninteractive.com">

http://www.aslaninteractive.com</a>

Jeff replies …

Off topic anchor text can still help build up PR, but won’t help as much as having the keyword in the link text…but it does still help.

If my main term was “Chicago Web Design”, I would go after the following terms and this is why.

The following keywords were found using the ‘~’ tool. Put a ‘~’ in front a phrase and do a search in Google. Google will bold everything in the serps it thinks is a synonym of that word. Part of Latent Semantic Indexing. Because these are synonyms, you want to try to rank for them as well.

Chicago Web Designer
Chicago Web Designers
Chicago Website Design
Chicago Web Site Design

The next list of keywords are longer tail keywords that have your main phrase in them. This was found through the Google Sandbox Tool or any other keyword tool. This will still help you rank for your main term, but longer tail terms as well.

Web design in Chicago
Web design Chicago IL
Chicago Website Design

I would never created back links from your company name, it’s just not competitive enough to get a backlink for. Same for the exact URL. You should be able to rank for both of those without any links.