SourceSquare

Using Views Programmatically - HKDUG Meetup with Jason Yee (Jyee)

Kelvin Lee — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 07:30:27 +0000

We had our monthly Hong Kong Drupal User Group meetup last week (thanks to CNNGo.com for the always wonderful venue), and this time it is a little bit different. Jason (jyee at Drupal.org) from Aten Design Group, one of the organizers of the upcoming Denver Drupalcon 2012 and a well known contrib module developer has joined us for the evening, and shared some of his thought on "Using Views Programmatically".

For those of you who missed the presentation, here is a video of the same presentation Jason did back in Drupalcon Colorado 2011:

For those of you who missed the fun part after the meetup, sorry we do not have any videos nor scripts for you, but you can share our joy with a few pics we took in the meetup (thanks to circlelo for the pics).

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Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Kelvin Lee — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 02:35:54 +0000

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Your inspirations will live in your Designs, in Apple, and in All of Us who admired you, forever.

May you rest in peace.

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Print Taxonomy Terms in Blocks and page.tpl.php in Drupal 7

Kelvin Lee — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 07:03:47 +0000

I recently have started working on a Drupal 7 project creating a comparatively simple brochure website. To my surprises a lot of familiar functions, syntax and platform for simple things have changed dramatically! Certainly many functions and handlers are become easier and simpler to do, however there are a lot of simple procedures gets to be more complicated.

Getting the Taxonomy term in page.tpl.php is one of them.

Drupal 6 - Taxonomy Term using $term object

Back in Drupal 6, Taxonomy terms are embedded in $node object. To print the taxnomy term, all you need to do is get it directly from the $node object:

<?php
foreach ( (array)$node->taxonomy as $term ) {
// $term->name has the taxonomy term name
// $term->tid has the taxonomy term id
}
?>

Drupal 7 - Taxonomy Term Reference CCK field

In Drupal 7 however, taxonomy terms are no longer embedded in $node object. They are now CCK fields that can be added to individual content type on the fly. However, it uses a CCK field type called "Term Reference", which means instead of storing the actually Taxonomy term in the Node, it stores the reference id of the taxonomy term. The actual Taxonomy terms are now now stored in a different table called taxonomy_term_data.

You can use the following snippet to retrieve the taxonomy term(s) in Drupal 7 instead.

<?php
// Load full $node object. IMPORTANT!
$node = node_load($node->nid); 
// Get the reference id of the taxonomy term.
$tid = $node->field_tags[$node->language][0]['tid']; 

// Query database table taxonomy_term_data with $tid from $node object.
$term = db_query('SELECT n.name FROM {taxonomy_term_data} n WHERE n.tid = :tid', array(':tid' => $tid));

// db_query in Drupal 7 returns a stdClass object. Value names are corresponding to the fields in your SQL query (in our case "n.name")
foreach ($term as $record) {
  print $record->name;
}
?>

5 Comments

Website and Blog Launch Glossary

Kelvin Lee — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 03:50:53 +0000

When I first started my career in the web industry, the very thing that I spent most of my time on was to look up the meaning of so many different terms and synonyms (which took as much as 50% of my time a day!). This glossary may help to save so many of your late night sleep searching in wikipedia!

A

Above the Fold – Content appearing on a website when it first loads, without requiring the user to scroll vertically. This is frequently considered the most valuable screen real estate.

Adsense – A popular ad network, run by Google, that allows you to publish contextual ads to make money from your website or blog.

Affiliate – Someone who promotes another person’s (or company’s) products on their website or blog and collects a portion of the sale price as compensation for sales referrals.

Affiliate Program – A program offered by a content creator where a portion of sales is paid out to affiliates who promote the product or service and refer sales.

Archives – A collection of older material on a blog or website, frequently sorted by posting date.

Analytics – Statistics related to your website or blog traffic
Analytics Program – A program or software that takes raw data about traffic to and from your website and displays it in easy-to-understand tables, charts, and graphs.

AJAX - Asynchronous Javascript and XML - a group of technologies to enhance the data retrieval process between users and servers. AJAX reduces the data exchange needed for each server enquiry to approximately 5%, hence can effectively limit and control the server workload and network bandwidth.

B

Backlink – A link referral that sends traffic from a third party website to your own website or blog. Backlinks can also play a role in search engine rankings.

Blog – A website where content is posted in chronological order and frequently includes open comments to allow conversations between the blogger and readers – can be anything from personal journals to company news to niche content.

Blogger – Someone who publishes a blog or writes for a blog published by someone else.

Blogosphere – A term referring to all blogs as one big collective community.

Blogroll – A list of links frequently included in a blog’s sidebar to point readers to related or recommended resources.

Blook – A book that was derived from blog content (turning blog content into a published book)

C

Captcha – A spam-control tool frequently used to prove a commenter is human and not an automated spam attempt (can include anything from retyping text found in an image file to solving a simple math problem).

Cascading Style Sheet – A document allowing a webmaster or blogger to control the look, design, and formatting of their website or blog content; allows design changes to be made in a single document instead of on individual Web pages.

Cloud Hosting – A hosting package where storage and resources are shared or split between multiple linked servers; an easily scalable hosting option where resources are available when needed and not limited to the constraints of a single system.

Comment – User-generated content in response to a blog post or article; reader discussion related to a blog post or article.

Commenter – Someone who publishes a comment to take part in a conversation on a blog or website.

Content Management System – (Also known as “CMS”) A platform or software used to publish a website or blog and manage the content of that website or blog from any location with Internet access (as opposed to making alterations offline and uploading all new material manually).

Contextual Ads – Advertisements posted to a website or blog based on each individual Web page’s content and keywords (Google’s Adsense is a popular contextual advertising network).

Control Panel – The dashboard that enables a blogger or webmaster to manage their Web hosting account, site files, analytics, and databases on the host’s servers

Cost per click (CPC) - is the sum paid by an advertiser to search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on their advertisement, which directs one visitor to the advertiser's website.

cPanel – A popular Web hosting control panel.

CMS – See “content management system”.

CSS – See “cascading style sheet”

D

Database – A collection of digitized and organized data (in terms of a blog the database would hold post data, among others, that can be pulled and served to the website where requested).

Dedicated Server – A server with a Web hosting company that only hosts websites or blogs for a single customer or user, allowing them full access to all server resources.

Domain Name – The name of a website or blog as it would be typed into a browser’s navigation bar to access the site (example: YourDomainName.com).

E

E-commerce Site – A website that enables buying and selling to occur online (such as an online retail shop).

Encryption – Concealing data for security purposes by converting common language and other data into code.

Extension – The last component of a domain name, which may signify intended use or location (common examples include .com, .net, .org, and .co.uk).

F

Feed – A way of presenting data on frequently updated sites (like blogs) that enables others to syndicate or subscribe to the content via a reader.

Feed Reader – A tool that allows you to access all feeds subscribed to from a central location (allowing you to read the latest posts from multiple blogs so you don’t have to visit each manually, for example).

File Transfer Protocol – A protocol that lets you move files from your local system (such as a new Web design on your office computer) to a network (like the Internet); a way to transfer files from your computer to your host’s server to have it appear online.

FTP – See “file transfer protocol”

G

Gravatar – A globally recognized avatar; a photo or other image representing your online identity which can be automatically recognized by blog comment and other online systems, generally tied to an email address you enter on the site when leaving a comment.

Guest Posting – Publishing articles (usually for free) to other people’s blogs in the hopes of getting exposure or traffic for your own site or blog through one or more backlinks (usually included at the end of the article).

H

Home Page – The Web page visitors see when they type your domain name into their browser’s navigation bar; the front page of your website or blog.

Hosting Company – A company that provides servers to webmasters and bloggers that host website files and databases and make the websites and blogs visible online to the public.

HTML – (Also known as “hypertext markup language”) A common markup language used to code websites.

I

Index Page – The default page a visitor sees when they access your website through the top-level domain; your home page.

IP Address – A numeral assigned to a device on a network; a number identifying your computer, website’s host, or other device.

J

JavaScript – A scripting language often used to add more interactive elements to a website or blog.

JQuery - A framework that consists of Javascript libraries. It consolidated and pre-initialize some popular Javascript visual effects and common functions together so that developers can focus more on working on new components instead.

K

Keyword Research – Researching the average monthly search volume for specific keywords and phrases that are relevant to your website or blog; frequently used to help bloggers decide what topics are popular enough to write about.

L

Link – A referral from one website to another, or from one page in a website to another page in the same website; when a user clicks they are automatically taken from the referring page to the referred page.

Linkbaiting – Creating content for a website or blog for the primary purpose of getting others to link to that content (to refer traffic and improve search engine rankings).

M

Meta Tags – HTML tags that do not appear on the publicly viewable front-end of a website or blog, but which describe or summarize the content of that page for search engines (most commonly used meta tags are the title, description, and keywords tags).

N

Niche Blog – A topic-specific blog (such as a blog on dog training in general) as opposed to a personal blog (diary or journal-style) or a company blog (covering company news, announcements, or posts that market products or services — like a dog trainer’s company blog where the blogger offers special deals and blogs for their target customer market).

P

Page – Content on a blog that falls outside of the chronological post order (such as a static “About Us” page).

PageRank - A proprietary algorithm developed by Google to determine the usefulness of an individual web page. Ranking scores from 0-9, where 0 being the lowest and 9 being the highest rank.

Pay per click (PPC) - An Internet advertising model used on websites, where advertisers pay their host only when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market.

Permalink – A URL at which a specific page or post on your website or blog can always be found.

Photoblog – A blog that relies on photos (and sometimes captions) as a primary form of content as opposed to articles.

PHP – (Also known as “Hypertext Preprocessor”) A scripting language used to develop dynamic Web pages and frequently used in content management systems and blog platforms (WordPress is an example of a PHP blog platform).

Plugin – A tool that allows you to add specific functionality in addition to the basic capabilities of your CMS or blog platform.

Podcast – An audio series frequently released in chronological order similar to a blog; an audio blog.

Post – An article or other chronologically-posted piece of content on a blog.

Problogger – A professional blogger; The name of a popular blog on blogging.

R

Raw Access Logs – (Also known as “raw logs” or “server logs”) Data recording the traffic for your website; Analytics programs use this raw data to display Website statistics in visual form.

Really Simple Syndication – A feed format that allows bloggers and other producers of dynamic content to distribute or syndicate their content or make it available for private viewing via subscriptions and feed readers.

Registrar – A company that allows you to register domain names for your websites or blogs.

Relevance - How related a specific search keyword is to the content of a web page.

RSS – See “really simple syndication”.

S

Search Engine Marketing – The act of purposefully using search engines to drive traffic to your website or blog (search engine optimization is one example of search engine marketing, but this term is broader and also includes paid placement in search results through advertising).

Search Engine Optimization – The process by which you make a website appear more relevant than competing websites according to search engines so your website will appear higher in the list of search results when a visitor searches for terms related to your website (getting backlinks is often an important part of search engine optimization).

Secure Socket Layer – A security protocol that establishes a secure session between the user and end site by encrypting transferred data; a frequently used security protocol on online shopping sites that protects users’ personal and financial data as it is transferred from the user’s computer to the seller’s system.

SEM – See “search engine marketing”.

SEO – See “search engine optimization”.

SERP - Search Engine Result Page, the return result of a search using a keyword through the use of search engine.

Shared Hosting – Hosting accounts where several or many websites are hosted on a single server where they share resources; the least expensive form of Web hosting, but not capable of handling high traffic sites due to shared resource limitations.

Spam – Unwanted comments on a blog, often unrelated to the blog content and usually posted primarily to try to secure backlinks from the blog.

Splog – (Also known as a “spam blog”) A blog that exists solely to rank highly in search engines to attract visitors and have them click on ads for revenue; content is often stolen and automatically harvested (“scraped”) from other blogs and republished on the splog.

SSL – See “secure socket layer”.

Static – A page on a website or blog that never (or rarely) changes; A website where pages aren’t frequently updated such as they are on an ever-changing blog.

T

Tag – A keyword associated with content (such as a blog post) that allows it to be searched for more easily by grouping like content under the same labels.

Theme – A blog design or template.

Trackback – A notification on a blog or website that another blog or website has linked to it.

Traffic – The movement and flow of visitors to and from your website or blog, or from one page to another within your site structure.

U

Uniform Resource Locator – The address of a Web page or other piece of content on the Web (the character string you type into your browser’s address bar to access something specific).

URL – See “uniform resource locator”.

V

Video Blog – A blog where the primary form of content is online videos.

Visit – An occasion where a visitor accesses your website or blog over a set period of time (a visit can include a single Web page or multiple pages before the visitor leaves).

Visitor – An actual individual visiting your website or blog (sometimes over a set period of time such as a few hours or a day, whereas “unique visitors” are only counted once).

Virtual Private Server – A type of Web hosting plan where you share a server with others (less than traditionally on a shared hosting plan), but where each user gets a dedicated amount of resources so their sites don’t affect the performance of those on other users’ accounts.

Vlog – See “video blog”.

VPS – See “virtual private server”

W

Web Page – An individual page on a website.

Weblog – See “blog”.

Webmaster – A person who develops and / or maintains a website.

Website – A collection of Web pages linked under a single brand and domain name and used to publish content to the World Wide Web.

Website Template – A pre-designed Website design that you can download or purchase and install “out of the box” as an often less-expensive alternative to custom designs.

Widget – A small application or component that can be embedded on a Web page and controlled by the site owner or webmaster; widgets are often used to display third party information or tools and in blogging are frequently used in the sidebar.

WYSIWYG Editor – A “what you see is what you get” text editor often found in content management systems (similar to the familiar interface of word processing programs like Microsoft Word); enables you to add and edit content without knowing HTML.

X

XHTML – (Also known as “extensible hypertext markup language) A language using XML to make improvements upon traditional HTML coding.

XML – (Also known as “extensible markup language) A file or data format allowing you to store and exchange structured data; XML is not limited to use in Web browsers as HTML is designed to be.

The glossary was updated based on the Website and Blog Launch Glossary originally created by our friends at Insider.pk. You can find the Chinese translation of the Website and Blog Launch Glossary in our corresponding blog post.

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Why Has Drupal CMS Become Our Choice of Development Platform?

Kelvin Lee — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 09:42:37 +0000

Before we jump right into Drupal CMS, perhaps we should start why the market is obsessed with designing websites with CMS.

What is CMS? Why CMS?

"CMS" (Content Management System) is THE hip, trendy term on the Internet in 2010s. As elegantly described in Wikipedia, a Web CMS is basically a system that "simplifies the publication of web content to web sites and mobile devices -- in particular, allowing content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files."

Generally speaking, the rise of CMS is due to the huge success of Blog platforms like blogger.com. Ever since the launch of blogger.com in 1999, next thing I know everyone has started publishing on the Internet, and the volume of new content published online exploded in folds ever since.

With the increasingly popular online marketing concepts like SEO (Search Engine Marketing) and social media marketing, which both dictate that a successful website in 21st century requires a very rapid content creation rate (perhaps we could talk a bit more about these in the future), many individual developers and software companies jumped into developing different versions of CMS to their own likings to serve the market demand, and gradually contributed to the phenomenon growth of CMS products.

Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla And More

Among many CMS available in the market today, the most popular ones are Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla. Interestingly, all three of these CMS are open sourced, which means that they are maintained primarily by individual passionate developers around the world, for free. You may think that this may render the project or it's maintenance unreliable, however surprisingly these CMS products are much more complete and successful compare to it's commercial alternatives like Magento or Compsite. How Open Source work deserves a separate topic, so perhaps we shall leave that to the next blog post.

There are many hot debates about which of these 3 CMS is better over the others. I will leave that conclusion to the enthusiasts, however if you want to look into these CMS in a more practically and funcitonal manner, you may find out more about our methodology on how to choose between Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla for our client projects.

Why is Drupal Our Choice of CMS?

We like Drupal CMS for a lot of reasons:

Search engine friendly design out of the box
CCK and Views
Advance form and theme engines
Advance user management...

But they are not all.

CMS, or every single software product in the world have one thing in common: they all have very unique personalities. Just like working with people, sometimes wrong match of personality could lead to unfavorable result; on the other hand, the result of your work could be unexpectedly good if you have found the right "partner" with the right "personality", and that's how we feel about Drupal at SourceSquare.

May be you are like us have a different passion toward another CMS? What would be your choice then?

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Youtube Is Rolling Out New Expand Feature

Kelvin Lee — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 03:25:44 +0000

Just while I was stumbling upon Youtube looking for a few relaxing video clips to spice up my breakfast, I was surprised and super excited that Youtube has finally started rolling out the most wanted feature (of mine) -- viewers can now "expand" the video to window size!

Ok, it might be quite confusing to those who don't usually use the expand feature. "Expand" is a button that locates on the lower right corner of every youtube video (this feature is only available if you are watching the clip on Youtube.com). Once you click on it, it will expand the video clip to the size of your browser window, and change the resolution automatically from 360p to 480p.

It is a very good feature for most people, though if you are using a hi-res monitor, it could still be too small. You certainly could switch the video to fullscreen mode, however not everyone would wanna sit still, do nothing and watch those random people singing their lungs out (don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Jayesslee and Christine Grimmie), and this new enhanced expand feature seems to be the solution for all.

As soon as I pressed the "Expand" button, the video clips was immediately zoomed in to the size of the safari window. Awesome, but that is not all. Google has done a beautiful job so that you can do almost everything without leaving this beautiful expanded video clip.

Video Controls

Video controls is now automatically hidden just like the way it is in fullscreen mode. You can bring up the video controls tool bar by moving your mouse or click anywhere on the video, and it will automatically appear in the middle of the window. Despite of the usual playback control, Youtube has added a thumb up and thumb down buttons for you to show your appreciation (or otherwise...) without leaving the video clip.

In-Video Search

This new expand feature is such a well thought out enhancement (and get me thinking if that has anything to do with Google TV...). If you move your cursor closer to the top of the video, a search bar will appear! You can do a search directly in the video, and the results will show up at the bottom of the screen just like the "Related to..." results. This is a brilliant UX enhancement and I believe it will help engaging visitors to stay on Youtube and increase the pageviews.

Cons? Of Course

There is one problem, and I think it could very well defeat the purpose of all these user experience enhancement. Whenever I move the cursor outside of the video, I get the "Related To..." tool bar, which pretty much covers half of the window, making it very difficult to watch the video if I want to do something else at the same time. Youtube definitely needs to fix this when they are rolling out this feature officially if they want this new investment a success.

It seems that right now all these features are only available on Safari, which got me thinking though -- shouldn't they start with Google Chrome instead (maybe it does in Windows, but oh well I wouldn't know as I only tested with my Mac)? Nonetheless, I love these features and hopefully Youtube will roll them out across all browsers and operation systems very soon.

Do you like these features? Will it be more convincing if this is what the future Google TV gonna look like?

No Comments

Drupal vs Wordpress vs Joomla - How Do We Choose Between The Three

Kelvin Lee — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 09:03:38 +0000

It has been an endless debate in between the 3 groups of CMS fans over which one is better than the other. Of course we as a web design agency we tend to take sides too since we use these tools day in and day out, however, in a more practical, project-oriented point of view.

By Experience

We have worked with Drupal, Wordpress and Joomla before. For a more completely, user-friendly CMS with just enough features, Wordpress is the choice given that their UI is best and most intuitive among all 3. This is a perfect platform to develop websites with simple requirements, e.g. Blog sites.

For a small to medium size website that require flexibility to certain extent however, we may choose Joomla over the other two. Try to recall the hassle you had to go through back then when you simply wanna point a navigation menu item to a URL in Wordpress, you will know what I mean.

As for a multi-site / multi-user capability, or enterprise websites that require more feature rich design, we would choose Drupal over the other two. It has the best framework among the 3, so that it is very easy to develop custom modules according to specification. However, the learning curve for both the developer and users to use it is the steepest among the three as well. It's simply a beast.

Multi-lingual Capabilities

Other than the nature of the 3 CMS, one other major component that constantly influences our decision usually lies in the multilingual requirements, which is extremely common in Hong Kong to develop websites for 2 or more languages. As in this case, Drupal wins it all. The multilingual capability of Drupal is the so complete that it is built into the core in Drupal 6 or higher, pretty much guarantee the compatibility of future add-ons and new features.

Joomla on the other hand, is ok in terms of multilingual capabilities through an extension called Joom!Fish. However the user interface (UI) Joom!Fish is still too confusing for general users. As for Wordpress... we haven not been following closely with the latest development in the last 2 months, but from our past experience, the multilingual capabilities (through the use of a plugin called "WPML") is still rather incomplete, that often drove us away from choosing Wordpress over the other two.

The Fuzz

When it comes to choosing between Wordpress vs Joomla vs Drupal, there is always this fuzz quite often comes from a very generic source - the project scope.

For clients, it is almost certain that they want the project done with the most user-friendly, feature rich and social media integrated platform yet hoping to retain the capability of scaling out easily. It is very interesting though that these "wishes" always lead to a bi-polar decision -- Wordpress is not so scalable meanwhile Drupal is not so user-friendly, meanwhile Joomla is just not the best choice to meet either end of the wishes.

As in this case, budget will come into play :D

IMO, unless the client already have the next phase of the project in mind, or if they have very specific requirement on scalability (i.e. the client knows what exactly they are asking for and why), we would usually recommend the least robust CMS and disregard the scalability in decision making process. The pros usually can easily outrun the cons to meet one's needs than wishes (wants).

Drupal CMS Official Website (www.drupal.org)
Wordpress CMS Official Website (www.wordpress.org)
Joomla CMS Official Website (www.joomla.org)

What is the most important consideration if you were a client? How would you choose between the three if you were a developer?

3 Comments

Happy Chinese New Year of Rabbit!

Kelvin Lee — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 04:32:05 +0000

Dear Customers and Friends,

Thank you very much for your enormous support in the year of tiger! We could not have made it this far without you. We are all eagerly ready to return the favor to you all in the year of Rabbit, so please feel free to let us know when the time comes!

Happy Chinese New Year! Hope to see you soon!

Best,

Kelvin Lee
Director
SourceSquare | Search Marketing Strategies

No Comments

Why You Should Care About Link Requests

Kelvin Lee — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:14:17 +0000

Do you have a website, or are you managing one? Have you ever received email asking if you can link to some other websites and don’t know what to do? We will tell you why you should care about these link requests, and what to do to get the best out of them!

What Are Link Requests And What They Mean To Your Site

There are approximately 200+ factors to determine the ranking (here "ranking" is referring to the position of a page in SERP, not PageRank) of an individual webpage by modern search engines, particularly Google. Each of these factors is weighted differently, and it may change in time to prevent people from gaming the search engines.

Among all these "ranking" factors, backlinks-related ones make up of as much as 15% of total score, which is considered one of the most important area to determine a success of a website.

The relationship between links and ranking is simple (we try not to be techie as much as possible) -- No. of links, relevance of the link source, and link quality. In other words, the more backlinks, the more relevant of the site linking to you, and the higher PageRank the site linking to you has, the better your webpage / website is going to rank in search engine.

How To Respond To A Link Request

As an SEO professional, link building is in our blood (and that’s what we feed it too Orz). It involves more than creating good content to attract people to link to -- we will go around and ask for links from sites we find valuable to our SEO effort.

There are many ways for the webmasters (website owners) and SEO professionals might use to request links from you, and it might be confusing to tell which of these requests will benefit your own site. Below are the 3 scenarios that you bump into most often, and I will explain a little bit why and why not you should accept the link request, and what you can do in response.

Scenario 1: You are requested to link to their website, while they are offering to do the same.

This is the best scenario. All you should watch out for is if their site is really useful to your readers. Your readers definitely don’t want to be lead to a real estate website while reading some fashion articles of yours.

Scenario 2: You are requested to link to their website, period.

Well, they think your link is valuable, but perhaps not your content. I will not blame them for not counter offering a link from their site to yours as well since that there has always been a rumor that the ratio of inbound and outbound link do matter to the ranking of your site.

If you think their content is useful, you might just link to them anyway for the sake of your readers. You can also consider negotiating with them and ask for a link back. It's entirely up to your mood of the moment.

Scenario 3: They request a link from you, while offering a link in return from some other site.

This is always a big turn off to me. If you look closely enough, the site they are offering to link to you in return usually have whole bunch of other outbound links with link text that has nothing to do to with your site, which means that they likely just setup the site they promised to link to you simply for the purpose of link trade (we call that kind of websites "link farms"). It will likely do no good to your site, and may eventually hurt your ranking if search engines realize that the site linking to you is a link farm.

Linking Back To Their Website

Link requests usually come with instruction on where to link to and what to use as the link text, however you don't have to follow it through and should only use it as a reference.

The best way I find linking to link partners is to link inline from within your own content. That way not only it looks natural when linking out, it also adds value to your content referencing external sources.

What's the most creative or weirdest link request you have ever received?

No Comments

SEO Quick Tip #1 - Dress Up Your Search Result

Kelvin Lee — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 04:37:46 +0000

We have received many emails from our fellow readers asking if there’s anything they could do on their own to jump start their web traffic recently. Thanks all for the email folks! We will try to answer all your email as soon as possible, but it may take a while. Sorry for the long silence in advance :P

Anwyay, SEO is never a rocket science. In fact it is much more similar to PR and marketing than you think, so certainly there are many many things that one can do without touching the code (oh well… perhaps a little…) or techie stuff. Hence we are launching this quick tip series hoping to give you some insight from a more general perspective, hopefully you will find a tip or two useful as time goes by.

For the first video of or series, we are going to talk a bit about the importance of dressing up your search result. Many have focused on how their pages are ranked on search engines, however they have overlooked the fact how their pages look like in the search result in the eye of the visitors.

It is actually more important if the search results of your website are appealing!

What do you guys think? What do you want to see in the next Quick Tips video?

No Comments

SourceSquare

Using Views Programmatically - HKDUG Meetup with Jason Yee (Jyee)

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Print Taxonomy Terms in Blocks and page.tpl.php in Drupal 7

Drupal 6 - Taxonomy Term using $term object

Drupal 7 - Taxonomy Term Reference CCK field

Website and Blog Launch Glossary

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

P

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Why Has Drupal CMS Become Our Choice of Development Platform?

What is CMS? Why CMS?

Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla And More

Why is Drupal Our Choice of CMS?

Youtube Is Rolling Out New Expand Feature

Video Controls

Related videos

In-Video Search

Cons? Of Course

Drupal vs Wordpress vs Joomla - How Do We Choose Between The Three

By Experience

Multi-lingual Capabilities

The Fuzz

Happy Chinese New Year of Rabbit!

Why You Should Care About Link Requests

What Are Link Requests And What They Mean To Your Site

How To Respond To A Link Request

Scenario 1: You are requested to link to their website, while they are offering to do the same.

Scenario 2: You are requested to link to their website, period.

Scenario 3: They request a link from you, while offering a link in return from some other site.

Linking Back To Their Website

SEO Quick Tip #1 - Dress Up Your Search Result