LauraLuo.Net :: Web Untangled

I have been looking for a complete list of Search Ranking Factors and found this useful article on SEOMOZ.org. http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#ranking-factors

This is the best one I have seen so far. According to SEOMOZ.org, it is based on input from their panel of 72 SEO experts. I have been trying to convince people that SEO is a specialty and if it were done right, it should not be taken lightly. There is the general notion that by changing a few things here and there will boost ranking but SEO has evolved greatly in the past few years. For example, one of the factors people tend to place important on is Meta Keywords. Historically, sites have abused Meta Keywords by stuffing it with lots of keywords. Today, Meta Keywords matters very little. As a matter of fact, it has a 5% very minimal importance according to the article. If you are struggling to tell your company that doing SEO is no simple task, this article can open some eyes.

Many sites now have the Facebook Activity Feed integrated with their pages but how much activity is happening with it? We were recently challenged with this question and the solution to track clicks in the Activity Feed turned out to be quite straight forward. For instructions on how to track it, you can read the full documentation here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/activity

The key here is to include a parameter ref=”page_location” in the iframe source code that calls for the Activity Feed plugin. This parameter would then be appended to each link in the plugin in the form of fb_ref=”page_location” and would show up in the referrer URL. The page location value can be different (e.g. ref=”homepage” or ref=”sports homepage”according to the page the plugin is on. This way you can not only get total click activity on the plugin but also be able to break it down by page location in order to determine which page generate the most click activity.

Often times I find myself trapped in data pulls across multiple time periods which leaves me little time for actual analysis. Not to mention how slow the reporting server can be and when the time period span across more than one year. I have to not only deal with multiple data pulls but also cut and paste data into Excel spreadsheets for additional computation. Whether it be calculating % distribution or % change YOY and MOM, there is simply not enough time that is left for real analysis. For these reasons, I can’t live without Omniture SiteCatalyst’s Excel Plugin. For all of you out there, please use it if you haven’t. Save time from pulling data so you’ll have more time for generating insight.

Recently I ran into a problem with broken tag on content pages published using Moveable Type. The JavaScript tag simply breaks. Specifically, this happens when a blog entry title contains apostrophe. For example, the title of the blog entry is something like: Laura’s First Blog

In the Javascript tag, the code breaks where the variable is set. For example, if PageName variable were to set with the value: Laura’s Frist Blog, the apostrophe breaks the code as it essentially reads like it’s missing a closing quote.

Breaks:

PageName=’Laura‘s First Blog’ – apostrophe after Laura breaks the JavaScript tag

Fix:

PageName=’Laura\’s First Blog’ – to use apostrophe or other characters as a literal, escape them with a backslash