Search Engine Optimization Increases Business » Any Questions?

Sometimes I'm baffled by the lack of understanding most business owners have in the value of online visiblity. Even some of the clients I have worked with which have seen and realized fantastic results still fail to recognize the benefits. In this desperate economy isn't an increase in revenue a good thing?

I recently went through the effort of creating a detailed analytics presentation on the performance of one of my clients sites since signing with Florida Search Engine Optimization. Self promotion aside - their site is performing and producing phenomenally well, which in turn evaluates to a significant increase in revenue. However, shortly after giving the successful presentation and discussing moving forward with increasing their search marketing efforts - their focus and committment waned and they haven't moved forward since.

Not trying to brag here ... but I feel it's important to mention that I hardly ever market for new clients - Almost all of the business that I get is through my own optimization efforts. When I first started out I did have to grab the 50 pound phone to get things kicked off, but I haven't had to do "hard marketing" in a long time ...

I feel partially responsible in not being able to effectively communicate the value of SEO to the "C Suite" ... I guess I just consider an increase in conversions and revenue a no brainer.

That's it.

Recently I decided that it's time to start paying a bit more attention to improving the visual presentation of one of my sites. The site's built in ColdFusion with lot's of nifty CF Ajax stuff thrown in. CFDiv's, CFWindows, and Pods here and there too. So, I figured since I'm not too bad at coding in CF - at least I can usually Google my way through most of the snags I run in to - I wanted to try challenging myself a bit by taking on something fairly foreign to me. Ajax.

I know the basics of Ajax. Asynchronous JavaScript with XML - Sending and receiving Http requests and responses to a server to return data to a site without refreshing the documents. However, I had little experience actually taking on an Ajax project. But if that wasn't difficult enough, I wanted to get really frustrated, so I decided to use a JavaScript library that I had little if any experience with - Entrance JQuery.

Now I've seen a lot of very groovy examples of the nifty UI tricks that can be done with JQuery. They are cool. But I really wanted to learn how to use JQuery for my specific needs. So, I did. I choose to launch my campaign with a real world example. So for my project, I mapped out what I wanted to do with ColdFusion, JQuery, and Some CFAjax stuff. Here's what I planned out ... First, I wanted to add a US database to my site, SEOMasterList.com, to build out some dynamic pages. The reasons for that should be quite apparent. I'm planning to obtain rankings and possibly monetize the site.

Next, I wanted to add some cool visual effects while providing improved functionality to the site, and possibly give visitors a better experience.

And finally, I just wanted to see if I could actually do it - two weeks in to it, I finished it. I have got to admit I spent a hell of a lot of time learning while trying to get the site done - someone with experience could have probably launched it in a matter of no time. But, I learned a lot.

Once I modified, installed, and built out the components to accommodate the addition of the database, I set up another component to dynamically bind the results from the database to two selects in a form. This was very challenging - I spent the better part of two days just trying to get the bindings to work. Luckily, I found a cool ColdFusion script and modified it to output my database queries to XML. That came in really handy. The first go at trying to output 80,000+ records to a single flat XML file didn't work out to well. I ended up rebuilding the data CFC's several times in order to get what I needed. I ended up with a 1.4 MB XML file that I'm now using to bind to the data in the selects.

After tackling that part of the project, I wanted to introduce some visually appealing effects to the site so I picked up the latest JQuery code and sent it up to my site. After some effort, I was successful in creating a pretty slick interface for my Ajax loaded form. Through the use of some nifty ('#div').show(),('#div').hide () functionality on the form page, I was able to add and remove elements of the page which weren't necessary at every stage of the form submission process. This proved to be tougher to implement than I had expected. Up to this point I have a form bound by CFC's to data, an asynchronous form handler to process a form submission, and some nifty JQuery going on to assist in dressing up my application modifications. All in all. I think it went really well - and I learned a whole hell of a lot doing it. If you want to see what I did ... have a heart ... I'm an Ajax nOOb. Check it out on SEOMasterList ...

In my last post, I was ranting about a frustrating situation with CFC's on shared hosting over at HostMySite. Several months ago, I installed a rather cool CFC that only had a life span of three days - it worked fine - then all of a sudden - it stopped working.

A few weeks ago the same scenario took place - I installed a component on another one of my CF sites, SEO Master List - It ran fine for three weeks and the all of a sudden - it stopped working.

After many hours of confusion with the guys over at HostMySite, it turns out that occasionally during server resets the security permissions are changed. I really don't know whether there's someone to blame for it, but at least I know the why of it if not the how.

So, if you have a CF site on shared hosting over at HMS and find your CFC's stop working and your pretty certain that they should be, make sure to take a look at the security settings - That's it.

Okay, So I might be a bit frustrated here ... I have had ongoing issues with CFC's at HostMySite, and I can't for the life of me find the root cause to my dilemma. If someone could give me a clue ... I would really appreciate it. My problem follows ...

I have shared hosting accounts with HostMySite for my CF sites. A few months back I attempted to work with the CFlickr CFC on my blog ... However, after a few days of being in operation, I started to receive errors stating that ...

" The value of the Function Foo is not of type components.someComponent. "

After working with tech support for a few days, our first guess was that there was a mapping issue with the CFC, and that we just needed to update the mappings ... after checking the mappings several times, reinstalling the component several times, and having support finally tell me that "there must be something wrong with the code", I abandoned the project feeling a bit ... beaten.

Recently I created a feed aggregator based on the same code from ColdFusionBloggers ... For several weeks the site ran fine ... no problems. But recently, I tried to login to the admin area ... and I started to receive errors by email that were strikingly similar to the errors I had with the CFlikr CFC. This time I'm getting ...

" The value returned from the getComponent function is not of type components.entries "

So, I contacted tech support, only to hear the familiar lines ... "We'll create a ticket ... and call you when we know something ... " Which usually means I'll have to figure it out for myself. Now, I don't quite understand why a component would just stop working without any changes to it ... but I'm starting to think that this issue is not something that I caused. If there's a CFer out there that has had a similar experience and found a solution ... could you please throw me a rope?

That's it.

Okay, so I am only a year in to CF development now, and I still feeling about as confident with my skills as well, the first month I started ... don't ask me why, but I always seem to find a problem that baffles me. This time is not an exception.

I recently moved to Application.CFC ... (Don't know what that is? Don't worry, I know as much as you. Want to find out more? ... Ray "Raymond" has info on his site ... )

So, this move came about since I had no idea how to manage error handling for 404 pages in CF ... for instance, if a link to a page on my site was missing, or broken ... the 404 page would get returned. However, if someone requested a .cfm page that did not exist whatsoever ... then the "IIS" template would kick in ... Not Good ...

So, I wanted my 404 template to kick in even when someone requested a specific ColdFusion page as well as broken links, moved pages, anything else ...

The only way to get what I really needed ... a default error handler in CF for all pages ... was not going to be available on a shared hosting platform ... which my site is on ... Good thing that ColdFusion 8, has the functionality available by way of the onMissingTemplate function through Application.CFC ...

Now, I saw a few references regarding the cflocation tag ...

<cffunction name="onMissingTemplate" returnType="boolean" output="false">

   <cfargument name="thePage" type="string" required="true">

   <cflog file="somefiles" text="#arguments.thePage#">

   <cflocation url="404.cfm?thepage=#urlEncodedFormat(arguments.thePage)#" addToken="false">

</cffunction>

But this was a problem due to redirecting from a 404 page ... The search engines would definitely have a problem with a 404 page returning a "page moved temporarily" or a "page moved permanently" flag when in fact it didn't exist at all ... That would Not be good for the rankings ...

So, the answer it seems was to try a bit of a different solution ... similar, yet a bit different ... here's the next shot ...

<cffunction name="onMissingTemplate" returnType="boolean" output="true">

   <cfargument name="targetPage" type="string" required="true" />

   <cflog file="somefile" type="error" text="Missing template: #Arguments.targetPage#">

   <cfinclude template="404.cfm" />

   <cfreturn true />

</cffunction>

Generally it's not a real smart idea for a newbie coder such as myself to go playing around with really important functions on a production site ... but, then again I can't have problems with 404 pages either ... So, I chanced fate ... and came up with the solution above ...

I also created a custom 404 page which I am rather fond of ... if an event fires my 404 template ... I have an include of my site map so search engine robots can give me a some credit by crawling the sitemap ... and at the same time, I can offer my visitors a useful way to navigate a page that they might have been looking for ...

You have been warned! If, you decide to use a 404 page ... make sure that you don't include it either in your .xml site map ... and that you implement a header status 404 ...

<cfheader statuscode="404" statustext="Not Found" />

Furthermore, pay attention to your Meta Robots Tag ...

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

If not ... you are basically telling the search engines that your pages exist ... (status 200 » okay ) ... and that will kill your search engine optimization efforts ... fast.

I recently decided that it was about time to start adding some imagery to my Blog. I am the first person to go to bat for Content being the King on the web, but straight text content can at times be a little boring to look at. So I went on the hunt for a simple way to add life to my blog.

I found an API called CFlickr, that is written in ColdFusion and provides the ability to work with Flickr's REST API. There are some really cool examples of the things that you can do with the API over at SixFive.

CFlickr's developer, (Chris Blackwell), gives some very good examples of how the API can be used to develop dynamic pages through working with the API. He has even gone through the trouble of setting up the CFC's Documentation.

If you haven't ever worked with ColdFusion Components, there are a few things that you have to do to make sure that the component works correctly. If you are in a shared hosting environment, you will have to ask your host to provide a mapping to the directory where CFlickr is under your web root. Make sure you are careful to get the mapping right ... if you aren't ... you will find out really fast.

I'm not going to try to go in to a tutorial on using the API just yet, but if you are interested in learning more about it, you can get more at the CFlickr Site.