Archive for October, 2008
WordPress and SEO
Posted by Hieu Trung in SEO - SEM & Online Advertising on October 31, 2008
There is a big bunch of resources on optimizing your blog for search engines. I have tried to collect the best tips and plugins in this article.
These tips won’t flood your blog with visitors – no SEO tips will. Use these tips to improve your site, and fight for a lot of backlinks and visitors by writing quality content and putting a lot of work into it. It has never been easy to run a website, and it for sure isn’t getting easier.
Title tags in SEO
Posted by Hieu Trung in SEO - SEM & Online Advertising on October 31, 2008
I’ve been wondering if I’m using a good title format for my sites and which format is the best. Then I found a useful article on ProBlogger that talks about the formats. As a result, there is no best format for your page title, it depends on your needs of business and branding. Check out the analytic article:
Myths about Google
Posted by Hieu Trung in SEO - SEM & Online Advertising on October 31, 2008
Due to some problems with the computer, I was a bit late to the 3rd Google Webmaster Chat. They were making an exciting presentation about the myths that shouldn’t be believed about Google. All I could have was its last slide
Anyway, it’s better than nothing. And here are some of the myths:
Common questions at 3rd Google Webmaster Chat
Posted by Hieu Trung in SEO - SEM & Online Advertising on October 31, 2008
Deny directory listing on your blog/site
Posted by Hieu Trung in Web Development on October 25, 2008
Directory listing might be harmful to your site because others can browse and download all files in your directories. Preventing this problem is less than easy with 2 basic ways:
- Use blank index file: In most case, your web server will load the file named index.html in a directory by default when it’s called by the browser. So just upload a blank index.html to the directories which you don’t want to be listed. After that, your server will response a blank page instead of listing that directory when it’s called.
- Use .htaccess file: upload a file named .htaccess which contains only: Options -Indexes on your root directory. If you already have a .htaccess with other contents in it, simply edit and add 1 more row like above. All your directories are inaccessible from now on, a 403 page will be shown instead.
Advanced Google Search Operators
Posted by Hieu Trung in SEO - SEM & Online Advertising on October 25, 2008
We all know Google is great, but it’s much greater if you know how to use its advanced search operators to explore the WWW. I make a summary of useful and popular search operators here for reference. Most of them serve the SEO purpose very well. You know, I’m not gonna try to remember everything but just remember where to find it when I need (to save space in my “hard disk”), so I’ll post every necessary things on my site. If you are a pro Googler, just skip it.
Usability trunk test
Posted by Hieu Trung in Usability Analysis on October 17, 2008
Imagine that you’ve been bindfolded and locked insite a trunk of a car, then driven around for a while and dumped on a strange street. Could you look around the place and tell exactly where you are? If you ask your site users something like that while giving them a random link on your site, how would the answer be? Do you expect them to tell exactly where they are and what your site is about? If yes, firstly check if your have a user-friendly site by this simple but useful test.
Online Advertising Courses
Posted by Hieu Trung in SEO - SEM & Online Advertising on October 16, 2008
As the “online” industry is not really popular in Vietnam, you can hardly find some training courses about SEO, SEM or Online Advertising. So I’ve been looking for some online courses that help us out and found some good choices till now:
- www.lynda.com – Online educational provider. You can find any kind of courses from SEO to designing, programming or even WordPress here.
- www.sempoinstitute.com – Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO)
- http://services.google.com/ads_inquiry/awseminars – Google also has some seminars about Adwords, but unfortunately they’re not online.
I’m also looking for some BA courses. Hope to find them soon.
Becoming a BA
Posted by Hieu Trung in Business Analysis on October 13, 2008
What is a Business Analyst?
A Business Analyst (BA) is an organizer, listener, investigator, facilitator, communicator, collaborator, innovator, and much more!
A business analyst works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. The business analyst understands business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements and recommends solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
What is Usability?
Posted by Hieu Trung in Usability Analysis on October 12, 2008
From UPA in the ISO 9241 standard:
Usability is an approach to product development that incorporates direct user feedback throughout the development cycle in order to reduce costs and create products and tools that meet user needs. There are many definitions of usability from books by usability professionals.