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Judging a website by its Domain Authority Profile

As part of Branded3’s Data Team, something I do rather a lot of is competitor research analysis. What this involves is more than just finding out who a client’s main SEO competitors are, but also where they’re getting their links and whether they’re spammy or not.

Oh yes, I went there.

What this is about, is links profiles. Now, Tim Grice has already written an excellent post on the factors of a natural link profile so if you’re interested in all the ins and outs, I suggest you check it out.

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How to identify kill-stealing in your online campaigns

Xbox controllersI love Google’s new Multi-Channel functions in Analytics; I also love gaming.

Now we have that out of the way, I’m going to teach you how to find the kill-stealers of your online campaign through the assisted conversions in the multi-channel functions section of Google Analytics.

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Magento: Origins

We’ve worked with Magento quite a bit in the past and created some top-notch websites for our clients. The developments we’ve done have mainly been new site builds, meaning we can start from a fresh install and give the admin backend straight to the client, and familiarise them with it really quickly.

Recently, we’ve been working with a couple of existing e-commerce sites that need to be migrated to Magento, so we’ve started putting together some scripts to automate importing categories, product information, attributes, options, cms page etc. I thought I’d put together a series of posts that go into a bit more detail about each of these scripts.

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Copywriting for e-commerce

Many e-commerce websites don’t take into account how important the copy that accompanies each product or service is in persuading the customer to take that next step towards purchase. As such, the copy is never a focus, and often ends up being inconsistent or in some cases, non-existent.

Research and studies have actually found that quality copy can increase conversion rates by significant amounts, revealing a valuable tool for gaining the competitive edge against other e-commerce sites.

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Installing Apache, MySQL, PHP 5.3 on the Rackspace Cloud CentOS 5.5

I was playing around with the Rackspace® Cloud this weekend and came across two great tutorials for configuring CentOS 5.5 (one of the virtual OS images you can use) to be used as a standard web server.

The first tutorial I found covers setting up apache, installing MySQL and getting PHP installed along with the always useful PHPMyAdmin installation. It also had the useful line of code to allow port 80 use as this is blocked by default.

The second tutorial I came across was a simple guide to installing PHP 5.3 on the server (If you followed the first tutorial this also covers uninstalling the existing PHP version).

Overall the process of getting the Cloud server up and running was really smooth and I had a fully operational web server in the space of about an hour. It was also worth backing up the server image to the Cloud files to save time in the future setting up servers that need the same base config.

Effectively placing your brand on Facebook

Facebook Fan PageWith an increasing decline in the effectiveness of display ads, and the continuing growth of social media; brands are now taking their advertising efforts to this platform to try and reach as many people as possible.

Many companies rely on just setting up a Facebook page and obtaining as many friends as possible, but it soon becomes clear that there is more to successful integration with the social media world than that.

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SQL Function to find the direction between a mobile device and a POI

Following on from my previous post about finding the true distance between a mobile user and a POI; I’m now going to look at how to find directions from a triangulated point by a series of mobile towers and a POI.

Nowadays, mobiles are self aware geo-location devices, but not all smartphone’s are geo-location friendly and if you assume or target your application to a specific model; then you are losing out on a significant number of end users. So how can you make sure that your mobile application stays user-friendly?

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The rights and wrongs of Canonical URLs

Wikipedia: “URL normalization (or URL canonicalization) is the process by which URLs are modified and standardized in a consistent manner. The goal of the normalization process is to transform a URL into a normalized or canonical URL so it is possible to determine if two syntactically different URLs may be equivalent.”

Canonical URLs have had a lot of press during the last year since Google started ‘supporting’ them in order to combat duplicate content issues – amongst other things. I’m going to look at how carnonical URLs should be used, and what the consequences can be if used incorrectly.

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Setting Up the Development Environment for SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 (Fixed)

If SharePoint 2010 is targeted to Windows Server 2008 R2, then a quick question flashes to my mind, what about the development environment? Do development machine have to be a server class machine with Server OS? How can I setup the development environment on my development machine without Windows Server 2008 R2?

SharePoint 2010 is evolution of various different technologies which already existed prior to 1997. There are two major parts to SharePoint products and their development, SharePoint Foundation and SharePoint Server.

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Harnessing the power of Levenshtein distance to help site search

Levenshtein distance is a metric for measuring the ‘difference’ between two sequences.

The Levenshtein distance between two strings is defined as the minimum number of edits needed to transform one string into the other, with the allowable edit operations being insertion, deletion, or substitution of a single character. It is named after Vladimir Levenshtein, who considered this distance in 1965.

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Usability through content: 5 top tips for good web copywriting

Many businesses seem to focus on attracting traffic to their site without thinking of how to keep them there. The site’s content is often overlooked – usually trumped by focusing heavily on aesthetic – and not considered a priority when developing a new website.

However, the content and copy of your site has a huge impact on the overall user experience. By understanding the importance of your site’s content and taking measures to enhance it; you could experience a huge impact on your websites usability, and therefore its overall performance. We’ve come up with five tips to improve your site’s content and enrich the experience for your users.

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