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DCA Dublin Chinese Association

DCA got some great activities for Tri-valley community in the last two years. We look forward to more to come.

 

Online Catalog Site BoWinUSA.com is launched.

If you need a website to showcase hundreds of products for your clients, we can help you to build a nice one.

BoWinUSA.com is an online catalog site for promotional gifts. After loading all the images of hundreds of product items, we launched BoWinUSA.com and submitted its sitemap in XML to Google robots or crawlers to index them. We believe that you can find their products through search soon.

We have also created Facebook account to promote this website. If you need a site similar to BoWinUSA.com, you may contact us when you are ready.

Other online catalog sites we’ve built include: NewFashionsNY.com

Alexa

What Is Alexa Internet Traffic Rank?

Alexa is short for the company name Alexa Internet,  Inc., founded in 1996 and bought by Amazon in 1999. Alexa traffic rank is the rank position of a website traffic measure compared with other websites around the world.  The website traffic data is mainly from a panel of “millions of Internet users using one of over 25,000 different browser extensions.” e.g. Now Google.com  Alexa rank is #2  while Facebook.com is #1, which means Facebook.com has “ the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews” ( according to http://www.alexa.com/help/traffic-learn-more ). Google’s other domains got other traffic data and may rank differently.  For example, Google.ca ranks 66 globally and #1 in Canada, which means according to Alexa’s panel data, Canadian.

What is the worst Alexa rank for a website?    “No Data” or just some rank number over 10 million. For example, a brand new domain which only get a little data into Alexa’s panel, can rank #18,751,177.  It is possible that some domains of a few years old get “No Data” because the traffic is really low and no data ever got into Alexa’s monitored panel. One can be pretty sure they have pretty good traffic if the website Alexa rank is less than 100,000 (and the Google Adsense income can be pretty handsome.)  Meanwhile lots of website owners have very good business leads from their websites even their Alexa ranking is about 1,000,000 to 3,000,000.

Should You Care About Alexa Ranking?

The answer is a Yes, for some owners who want to sell their banner ads to some businesses unless they have good real traffic reports from Google Analytics or other authoritative 3rd party traffic analytic companies. Outsiders have no ways to learn about your real traffic data. Alexa rank is the only available 3rd party reference around the world.  Compete.com only measures US not international users and will not show report on your site if they consider your rank is “too low” unless you pay for the Pro membership. Although sometimes Alexa traffic rank is questionable, it is the only way to estimate the website traffic quickly as an outsider. So it is important for website owners trying to market their web page space for banner ads.

It is impossible to fake #1 or #3  traffic rank on Alexa.com, but it is possible to use massive spamming or other ways to bring sudden traffic to your site to improve the ranking for a short time. (It means after the efforts stop, the ranking will sure slide down dramatically )  The traffic may not do any good for your online business if you don’t sell banner ads or what  you care is real conversion from leads to real sales of your service and products. Pretty often those “black-hat” ways may get your website blacklisted by some major search engines.

What Is Your Current Alexa Ranking?

You can always check the Alexa rank by replace the domain name at the end of this URL with your own domain.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/chinesebay.com

It is very easy to know the current Alexa rank of a website if you install some Firefox Add-on or Chrome extensions.  My favorites are:

Firefox Add-ons

Firefox Add-ons

I installed Sparky because the official one from Alexa and it can help you to improve your Alexa rank for sure. I like the other one because I also care about Page Rank, which is an important number for Google search engine optimization, which I will talk about in a later article.

After you install the add-ons for Firefox, you need to restart the Firefox browser and activate it. Then when you can see the Alexa Rank when visiting the website of the domain you care about.

Activate Sparky

Activate Sparky

WebRank Toolbar

WebRank Toolbar

Spark Shows Rank Directly

Spark Shows Rank Directly

Top 3 & Top 10 Ranking Positions

Did you see a lots of ads or some websites saying they promise you to put you in the Top 3 & Top 10 Ranking Positions for your website for $99 up to $999?

How can you tell if what they say is a lie? Here’s how I see it.

  1. Check out their own rankings in Alexa and Google PR (page rank). If their own ranking is low, how can you trust them to help your website to rank higher? (Of course, one reason for their current low ranking could be that their website is too new. Then how reliable is a brand new website? At least main search engines like Google do not trust.
  2. Check out what they have promise you. Top 3 or Top 10 ranking?  For what keywords. Usually they may not mention any keywords that is important for your business. We can help your website to rank #1 in Google for just $10, but that could be useless. For example, our website BayWM.com can rank #1 in Google (click to see it now), but that doesn’t mean anything to us because who would type in BayWM.com to search if they don’t know this name?
  3. If you see their site because you click one of their Google ads or ads on other search engines, then why they need to pay higher to advertise them if they can get higher ranking for business websites. They could have done that for themselves rather than do it for your website first.
  4. SEO (search engine optimization ) is continuous hard work that takes time and efforts.

What would be the good keywords for your business website then?  Take our own website for example, one of good keywords could be “Bay Area SEO Web design”

We will cover more of this later in our SEO articles.

A Great Book On Usability

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition Click to Buy  It is a very popular book on Usability.

Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
By Steve Krug

Product Description

Five years and more than 100,000 copies after it was first published, it’s hard to imagine anyone working in Web design who hasn’t read Steve Krug’s “instant classic” on Web usability, but people are still discovering it every day.  In this second edition, Steve adds three new chapters in the same style as the original: wry and entertaining, yet loaded with insights and practical advice for novice and veteran alike.  Don’t be surprised if it completely changes the way you think about Web design. With these three new chapters:

  • Usability as common courtesy — Why people really leave Web sites
  • Web Accessibility, CSS, and you — Making sites usable and accessible
  • Help! My boss wants me to ______. — Surviving executive design whims

“I thought usability was the enemy of design until I read the first edition of this book.  Don’t Make Me Think! showed me how to put myself in the position of the person who uses my site.  After reading it over a couple of hours and putting its ideas to work for the past five years, I can say it has done more to improve my abilities as a Web designer than any other book.

In this second edition, Steve Krug adds essential ammunition for those whose bosses, clients, stakeholders, and marketing managers insist on doing the wrong thing.  If you design, write, program, own, or manage Web sites, you must read this book.”  — Jeffrey Zeldman, author of Designing with Web Standards


Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1257 in Books
  • Published on: 2005-08-28
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 9.02″ h x .43″ w x 8.35″ l, 1.04 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 216 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author
Steve Krug is a usability consultant who has more than 15 years of experience as a user advocate for companies like Apple, Netscape, AOL, Lexus, and others. Based in part on the success of the first edition of Don’t Make Me Think, he has become a highly sought-after speaker on usability design.


Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

51 of 52 people found the following review helpful.
5Sequel (2nd ed) lives up to the original
By Meryl K. Evans
When we design Web sites, we often overlook the simplest things because we’re too wrapped up in the design. After working on Web sites for a while, some of us have slowly moved away from what we know is usable to adding or removing elements that may enhance the `look’ – and also break a site’s usability.

Steer back on track with the new edition of Krug’s highly referenced book. Novice, intermediate, expert. No matter where you are on the scale, the book provides value to everyone – even managers, testers and project managers. Management likes to get their hands a little dirty when it comes to Web design projects and sharing this book may make the team’s life easier.

Anyone involved with Web design or usability will recognize most, if not all, of the concepts covered in the book. What makes Don’t Make Me Think usable is that it’s a great checklist to ensure you’ve covered all the basics.

Krug provides many before and after examples to show how a few changes can enhance a Web site’s usability. The illustrations reinforce the concepts covered as well as how visitors use and read a Web site.

As for the differences between the first and second editions, the second addition has three new chapters while usability testing shrinks from two chapters to one and with good reason.

The testing chapter breaks down the testing process into digestible steps; complete with a script between the tester (user) and the person watching the tester. Too often, we’ve seen testing get mangled or ignored. With this chapter, teams might find themselves empowered and eager to do testing.

The chapter on “Usability as common courtesy” explores how a site can make or break the “reservoir of goodwill” as Krug puts it. We arrive at a Web site with some goodwill and depending on how well the site meets or misses our needs; the goodwill level goes up or down. It may only take one mistake to propel visitors to flee.

Another new and short chapter is “Accessibility, Cascading Style Sheets and you.” Krug captures what developers and designers hear when it comes to accessibility and addresses what they fear. He lists five things designers and developers can do make a site accessible without a lot of effort.

Finally, the book closes with “Help! My boss wants me to…” Krug has received plenty emails and questions on the topic to identify two questions that repeatedly come up. He provides email examples for free re-use, so no one has to explain it to the boss.

It only takes about two hours or a plane trip to read. The writing is conversational, clear and packs a punch with a dash of humor thrown in. Reading the book is not much different than reading fiction because it flows well and the information sinks in without much effort.

If you get this book and have the 1st edition, I recommend keeping both. You might find helpful stuff in the original material not found in the new edition.

Website Watch: e-healthagent.com

网站观察 Website Watch: http://e-healthagent.com/   This site is pretty good and it is built using Joomla! 1.5, a great CMS or PHP framework for online community.

JC Health Insurance Services is offering  auto insurance, home insurance, health insurance, life insurance, travel insurance and work compensation.

Their website is a bilingual site with English and Chinese contents.  Its nice design provides the visitors with easy 2 step quote request.

 

Google Panda 3.4

Google Panda 1.0, a major change in Google’s search results ranking algorithm, was released in Feb., 2011,  a little more than a year ago.

Big sites such as J.C. Penny were hit by Panda!  It is a “Kungfu Panda” who may hit big guys.  From Wikipedia, we learned “that Google’s new Panda machine-learning algorithm, made possible by and named after engineer Navneet Panda”. With this major change, “many new ranking factors have been introduced to the Google algorithm” and some older ranking factors such as PageRank have been downgraded in importance.

Now Google Panda 3.4,  their latest update, was rolling out around  11pm PDT on March 23 in Hawaii and then globally. No official news was released except for a post on Twitter that night.

What Significant difference did Panda make? The new algorithm impacts an entire site’s ranking or specific section rather than just the individual pages on a site. And they said “Panda seems to focus on the web page date.”

In 2012, it looks like Google Panda may be updated every month:

Google Panda v3.2 :  1/14/2012
Google Panda v3.3:  2/29/2012

 

 

 

 

Organic Search Result Listing

When we do a search on Google.com or Bing.com, we usually get two types of listings: The paid listing and free listing ( which we usually also call organic or natural listing). Google  Adwords and Bing Adcenter ads are paid listing and usually found on the top or the right side of the result pages.

The search engines use different ways to determine the web page relevancy,  and show the most relevant pages to the query on the top on the result page.  According to Google,  they use PageRank along with other factors (over 200 of them) to determine the page relevancy to the user’s query.

Website developers may use SEO or search engine optimization techniques to improve their content pages, internal and incoming links to get higher PageRank so their web pages can get listed higher in the search result pages or SERPs (search engine result pages), thus get more traffic from the better organic search result listing.

Unless you have learn SEO, you still need to pay for SEO services to do the job. So organic search is NOT free in a sense, but when you find a real SEO expert who can do proper SEO for your website,  it may be more cost effective than using Adwords or other paid listing ads.

When we talk about SEM or search engine marketing, we usually need to cover SEO for organic search and paid online advertising.

Contact us today and talk to our SEO professionals about your website to get targeted traffic for more business from your website.

Best Hosting Services

We have tried many hosting services since 1996. We love some of them so much that we became an affiliate of these services so that we can refer them to our clients.
Disclaimers: We may get commission for referring new customers to them, but we or our customers are using these services and we believe that they are good enough for you to try. Most of these services give your 30 days money back warranty, so you can try them out on your own.

1. Linode: VPS fast, but maybe a bit pricy. Good for high traffic websites such as http://newsforchinese.com or http://Bayecho.com
Link: http://BayWM.com/linode great VPS Hosting
2.BlueHost Great affordable services. $4.94/month for unlimited domain hosting.
3.WebHostinghub.com

Web Hosting Hub

makes it easy to move from your existing web hosting company. Our no-downtime transfer process takes the pain out of “packing”!

  • NO-DOWNTIME Transfer
  • UNLIMITED Disk Space
  • Host UNLIMITED Websites
  • FREE Domain Transfer
  • UNLIMITED Bandwidth
  • LATEST PHP & MYSQL

4.Arvixe: Pretty affordable and you may host up to 6 domains for only $4/month.

Bay Area SEO Web Design

This is not our business name, but you may find us by Googling “Bay Area SEO Web Design” (sometime you may need to go to the 2nd page of the search result, but hopefully, after some SEO work is done for our own Web site BayWM.com, it will come up to the 1st page).

We have been offering SEO or search engine marketing, social media marketing, Web marketing to many businesses in Bay Area of greater San Francisco to professional services such as law firms, dental offices, and other small businesses since 2009. Our team lead Kaibo Paul Huang has actually been building business Websites since 1996 and has an increasing focus on SEO and Web Marketing because only valid targeted traffic means more businesses and revenue. Those websites include kp.org, kponline.org, e-market.net, dingding.tv, newsforchinese.com. Continue reading

Our Location

Our office is located in Silicon Valley San Francisco Bay Area, CA
San Jose Tel:408-676-8736 (8SEO)
San Francisco Tel:(415) 322-8799
Dublin Tel::(925)335-6728
Call today for your free appointment to talk about your business.

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