SEO Techniques that work

I must be doing something right, as last month had the highest numbers of both Unique Visitors and Visits [same person with more than one visit].

In addition to adding content and a few dozen new pages over the last few months, I have also been doing Search Engine Optimization [SEO].

As I've indicated in previous posts the SEO techniques primarily include adding 'alt' tags to pic files and 'title' tags to internal links. Many pages already had the html tags, but many pages did not have the enhancement, with some pages only having part of them. I've been making these enhancements over the last six months.

So my advice is to insure that every pic file has an 'alt' tag that describes what the picture is. In many cases a pic file also has a 'title' tag which describes the picture in greater detail. At the same time any page-to-page link also gets a 'title' tag, if it didn't already have one.

Now you could say that the increase in visits is due to content additions, or from adding new pages. However I would disagree, because although I have been adding a lot of new content, the per page content added is small. Or, much of the content added over the last six months is spread out over several hundred pages.

Secondly, the amount of new pages added over that time frame is also small, say around 61 pages in six months. Now you could say that was a great many additions to the site, but I'll try to indicate why it's not.

First off , any new page added last month [and December too] are still in the Google sand box and is irrelevant [Trimmer Resistor; random example]. Also any page added last month may not have even been completely spider-ed. So we'll forget about the 22 most recent page additions. November saw a lot of Component Package additions, pages holding gif files with little or no text ~ another 17 pages. October had a few 'How-To' additions which receive no hits to speak of ~ 8 pages. Same thing with September, just a few BJT Outline drawings which will receive zero visits ~ 4 pages. Now we're back to August, which is about the time frame that should start to matter, but again a few 'How-To' additions ~ 3 pages.

So I would discount 54 of the last 61 new pages as not adding anything to the site yet [really all of them]. I always assume 15 to 30 days before Google spiders a page. Than another 30 days before Google reads the page completely, still another 3 months after that before a page gets a Page Rank [if at all]. I'm not saying these pages aren't getting any page views just that the few dozen page views they are getting wouldn't show up as a change on the graph.

I contend that the increase in visits is due almost entirely from optimizing the pages for the search engines. Really, I've been adding pages to the site for years and I don't see any sustained increase in visits ~ but I do now. Search Engine Optimization has been the biggest change I've been making to the greatest number of pages over the last few months. The last few months are the highest for the site ever, not counting December [always a low month].

Now these 'alt' or 'title' tags also help site visitors, either by showing text if the gif doesn't come in or by providing detail if they hover over a link ~ it's win-win.

Now there is always one more point some would could make about the increase in page visits. That is the Google computer pushed this site up near the top of the search listing while another site moved to the second page. That argument could work for one month, but not for the last four months. As Google re-orders their listing every month. More importantly, we're talking about 1,600 individual pages, Google didn't push all of them to the first page!

Finally my page on Google Sites [Thermal Impedance ~ random page] is bringing in about 60 people/month, 73% of which are new to the site, word of mouth traffic? Googl Knol is bringing in yet another 60 visits per month at 57% new visitors [Component Derating ~ just a random page]. However neither of those referrals would seem to add up to the 10,000 additional visits which occurred last month, but it doesn't hurt either.

Right, we're trying to explain 20,000 new visitors, and the only thing I can say other then it is due to the SEO changes is that some how the few hundred visitors due to page additions or referrals adds into the thousands ~ I don't think so. Add the html TAGs.....

Why was my Page De-Listed

I pulled up one of my To-Do lists, sort of; add these companies to these pages [last accessed 2006].
I don't make To-Do lists any more, a few years ago I just started putting the data in an email and saving it as a draft. But I'm not blogging about the amount of data I have sitting around waiting to be added.

I checked one of the companies listed to see if it had already been added to the web site, on-site Google search indicated it had not. So I navigated to the 'manufacturers listing' to add the new company. Well guess what, the listing was there [Component Manufacturers]. So I see that the page has no Page Rank, but I can also conclude that the page will not show in Google search results [which is worse]. Although the page does exist and provides site visitors with data about the companies residing on that page, off-site users will never find the information because it will not come up in a search.
As with all pages in the Manufacturers Listing, the page has been on the web for many years. I don't understand why I can't get them listed. I do have pages pointing to them and they do get updated every now and then. I even have those pages listed in the Engineering Site-Map, but because Google uses 'no-follow' on Google Sites the link does me no good.

Although it might defeat the purpose of the page, I guess I could find some kind of text to add to the pages.
Other wise I have no way to protect the page from the computer algorithm deciding to list it or not.

Page Optimization

I'm always adding new content to the web site [Engineering Buses], either by inserting additional content to existing pages or just by adding new pages. So far this year 10 new pages have been added to the site, I don't track content enhancement. However I can tell how many pages have been updated, either from SEO practices or content additions, from the modified date on the PC I can tell how many pages have changed..
Jan; 327 page updates.
Dec; 328 page updates.
Nov; 389 page updates.
Oct; 296 page updates.
And so on, like I said I can't tell why a page was updated. However I could say that a page either received an embedded enhancement to help the search engines or had additional content added, and maybe an SEO change. Normally when I fix a page for optimization reasons it just means I added 'alt' or 'title' tags to links or gif files already present on the page.

I also add graphic or pic files all the time. Currently my PC indicates over 1,600 pic file [in a few different formats, gif, jpg..], however some may not be used but still reside on my PC. Maybe 1,500 different pic files and over 1,851 html files ~ both growing all the time.

So this month will have the highest number of visitors ever, not even counting today [numbers aren't in yet]. Here are the best 5 months [Number of Visits];
Jan 2010: 234,085
Oct 2009: 223,689
Nov 2009: 223,327
Mar 2009: 220,620
Jan 2008: 217,694
Graphic; Google Crawl Stats, last three months. At an average of 519 pages crawled a day, you would think that Google would find the 300 odd pages that are up-dated each month.

BluRay BD Player

I did end up buying a BluRay disk player the other day. However I want to play with it for another day or so before I write a review or make any recommendations one way or the other.

First off the resolution of a Blu-Ray disk far exceeds a DVD, more than I would have figured possible. I did purchase one BD DVD which I'll review below, but I was not to happy with the price. I only purchased one because there was a limited amount on the shelf, for what ever reason.

Which leads me to my second point, why are Blu-ray disks over ten dollars more than a DVD. I think we all know that the cost of a BD or DVD should be about the same. So instead of being taken advantage of I think I'll continue purchasing DVDs unless a Blu-ray disk is required, as in a Sci-FI or other high-res type movie. I see no need for some comedy or second rate movie to be in Blu-ray. Same as I wouldn't care if a comedy was in 7.1 surround sound, in fact I may not even turn my receiver on for a comedy.

None of the units ship with an HDMI cable, so be sure to purchase one with the unit. I figured I had one at home, but of course was to find out I didn't. So I started watching with Component Video and the Audio from Composite Video, Opps. However I did end up going out the next day to purchase an HDMI cable and a longer Ethernet Cable [to connect to my router].

So I find I can down load movies off the internet right into my Blu-ray player, that seemed a bit cool. There's even a few free movies out on-line, although I wouldn't recommend them. I also started watching [as background noise while working on the PC] an advertiser supported movie on-line. But as it stopped several minutes into the movie, and the room went silent, to download the advertisement I shut it off. Can't they buffer up those commercials? I mean it only took a few seconds of down-load time, but it just seemed like they were wasting my time waiting for an ad to download that I didn't even want to see in the first place.

Anyway I purchased Pandorum in Blu-ray. I like SciFi, and to me this one seemed pretty good.
Yes it is a Zombie in Space move [trapped on a spaceship], but so what, I just kept turning up the volume to see what would happen next. As you would guess there's a lot of running and hiding from the "Zombies", other wise they eat you. Now they're not really Zombies, but it's the same difference. Oh and these guys run like the 'new' Zombies [Resident Evil, 28 Days Later], they don't stumble like zombies from the 60's or 70's .

To many of the screens were dark [poorly lit], and there could have been one less chase scene but I liked it [and it looked great in Blu-ray].

So this is a prelude to a technical review of a Blu-ray player. I haven't started reviewing movies!

URLs Indexed by Google

This is the big question, right?
How do I get my pages indexed by Google?
I would say that the bigger question is how do I keep my pages index by Google.
Oh and the answer to either of these questions is of course '42'.

What I just noticed is that incoming links from other sites that are not indexed do not count as an incoming link. Maybe I already realized that fact, as I've seen many pages over the years fade in and out of the index. That's one of the many reason a page rank will go up or down, as pages fade in or out.

So using Google's Webmaster Tools to check the status of incoming links to pages, I found this; Most of the pages relating to the Dictionary of Capacitor Terms [topic page with the lowest page views] only had one external link pointing to them. Well that might be ok, but basically all pages should have at least one external incoming link, from my sitemap [interfacebus Site-Map]. The sitemap is located out on 'Google Sites' which is external to interfacebus.com. The difference here is that I know that the Capacitor Terms were only added to the site a few years ago. All new pages (page additions), in the last few years, get blogged about in the 'What's New Blog' [Engineering Pages]. So if I blogged about adding Capacitor Definitions [blog 11/17/07; Electronic Capacitor Dictionary], why is the external link from blogger [owned by Google] not being recognized? It certainty can't be because Google has not found it, it's been out on the web for two years.

Now that blog page, providing all the links, does have a page rank of zero [really no page rank available]. So can I also assume that the page is also not indexed in Google's listing?
Now I see another blogger page adding two new pages to the Capacitor Terms [blog 10/26/08; Dictionary of Capacitor Terms], that blog page also has no page rank and the two new Capacitor page links are also not recognized in Webmaster Tools. I blog about new pages for two reasons; first to show visitors what new pages have been added and to set the new page up with an incoming external link [SEO stuff]. Standard Search Engine Optimization [SEO] says to try and get external links pointing to your pages, well that's what I was trying to do. But if the pages I use go to a page rank of zero once they fall of the front of this blog than it's kind of pointless. I could add a 'history' page on the site, pointing to these blog pages. That would give the blog listings a page rank. Seems like a lot of effort, and kind of hard to keep track of [with all the different topics on the site]. Of course just by blogging about the other blog pages help [if that makes any sense]. I'll have to think about what SEO advice to give. However what I can say is that just because you blog about a page it really doesn't mean that the benefit will last more than a few months. So you have to find a way to keep a page ranking for pages that are used as 'external links'. One way would be to cross link, as I just did with this posting [pointing to the older blog posts]. Of course another way would be to re-post the pages, which I'll do now to make a point. However I don't recommend listing you page links over and over again in a blog ~ why would any one read the blog.......
Capacitor Dictionary pages, listed by the first term on each page.
Air Dielectric definition. [Page 1, main topic]
Capacitor Breakdown definition. [Page 2]
DC Leakage definition. [Page 3]
Electrode definition. [Page 4]
Farad definition. [Page 5]
Ganged Tuning definition. [Page 6]
Impedance. [Page 7]
Capacitor Manufacturers. [Page 8]
Paper Capacitor definitions. [Page 9]
Quality Factor definition. [Page 10]
Self Inductance definition. [Page 11]
Tantalum Electrolytic Capacitor definition. [Page 12]
Values, Capacitor definition. [Page 13]
..... This may appear to be a long post, but it's an important SEO topic that needs to addressed.
You'll note that I link to the Capacitor pages with a key word, and not just page 8 [for example] that means nothing to Google. Of course I also updated any of these pages as required.
Graphic; Leaded Chip Capacitor, Through-hole Capacitor.

Search Trends vs Page Views

As we all know the original SCSI interface is in decline and has been for a number of years now. The 'old' parallel bus is up against Fiber Channel [FC], Serial SCSI [SAS] and Serial ATA [SATA] to name a few of the possible Hard Drive interfaces.

In fact I found a chart of Worldwide HDD Shipments; All Form Factors by Interface, 2008-2012 [produced in 2009], units shipments vs year. The chart indicates that SCSI may have had a few percentage of the total units shipped in 2008, but is all but gone in 2009 and beyond. Seems right to me, of course there still must be a large amount of units still deployed even now, regardless of SCSI being obsolete. Their projection for 2010 indicates that 90+ drive units shipped would contain either a SAS or SATA interface.

But almost no SCSI drive was ever used as a personal 'home use' HDD interface, as the SCSI interface was always more expensive than an IDE drive interface. So most people would have never even had a chance to worry if they had an out-dated SCSI interface in their PC.

So as SCSI searches [on Google] dropped 90% over the last 4 years, SCSI page views on interfacebus have been flat. So why is that? The trend line above shows a tremendous drop in searches over the last four years, but visitors to this site remain constant. That tells me that over the previous last few years I've missed out on a large amount of incoming traffic. Were the pages on this site always relegated to some small portion of the key words, I guess there's no way to tell. Normally I don't like to finds pages that are in decline, but in this case I wish I did. Only because now I know that for a vast amount of internet searches related to the SCSI bus this site was never used. Any way; here are the rest of the pages that make up the SCSI section;
SCSI I interface description.
SCSI II interface description.
SCSI III interface description.
SCSI VI interface description.
SCSI V interface description.
SCSI single ended A cable, and  SCSI differential ended A cable.
SCSI single ended Q cable, and  SCSI differential ended Q cable.
SCSI B connector, and  SCSI P connector.
SCSI HDI-30 connector.

SEO advice; I don't have any optimization advice this time. Although pageviews to this SCSI related section have been constant, they have been consistently low.

Side note; I tried looking up 'Hard drive market forecast', HDD Sales trends, market volume and so on but I could only retrieve a table of contents to reports that had to be purchased. So finding the data is a bit hard and took a number of searches to uncover.
Graph: From Google Trends, using the search term SCSI [2004 to Jan 2010].

How to increase page content and grow visitors

Now we are looking at a different section of the site to determine how long to takes to gain new page views. A Dictionary of Resistor Terms section was added on April 11 2008 [blog posting; Resistor Definitions] consisting of ten pages. Some of the pages were larger or had more content then others, but 10 pages with ten different web addresses were added. The attached graphic shows the weekly pageviews for that section over time.

Now over time more and more content was slowly added as a new definition was added or a resistor definition was expanded. Also related content was added, as in 'Trimmer Packages', but was included in a different section of the site which is not represented as being part of the Resistor Dictionary. As a few of the pages grow to large they were subdivided into two pages growing the size in pages of the dictionary. For example back in June of 2009 [blog; Terms used with Resistors], the page "F-M' was separated into two pages increasing the size of the dictionary from 10 to 14 pages.

Now to the point; look how long it takes even to get a small amount of page views. It took 8 months before the page views consistently lifted off the zero floor. Another 6 months after that before the pageviews doubled. So, over a year before the section started to get a decent amount of page views. Still 6 months after that and the pageviews are just stable, or maybe increasing just a tad.

As always my SEO advice is start a page topic as soon as possible. Now if the page has little or no content don't blog about it. Just add it to your site-map or let the search engine find it over the upcoming month.

The bad side of this increase [which is only a few dozen pageviews] is that over the same time frame, other pages are declining in page views. For example the Unified Display Interface has been declining ever sense the page was added three years ago. Now that standard was started but never supported so it's not the fault of the web page. The issue leaves the entire web site with near flat pageviews, as some pages are increasing while other have to see a decrease in pageviews.

Test Equipment Manufacturers

Just at random I figured I would check how the small section of Test Equipment Manufacturers was doing. The page count, or the number of pages in the section has been stable for a while. The last addition was Thermal Test Chambers added back in Feb 2008. Before that the Frequency Counter page was added in Nov. 2007. All the other pages predate those additions and never showed up in the other blog...

So which page is doing the worst so far this year; LXI Test Equipment. Now I just saw an article, from last year, about how LXI was growing but I can't tell from the hits I'm getting. Also because I always update a page I blog about, a new manufacturer was added, which seem to be pushing LXI-VXI. It was my impression that LXI was competing with the HPIB interface. The difference being small, but HPIB gear is normally stand-alone equipment and VXI cards embedded in a chassis.
After that the page covering Thermal Image Manufacturers did the worst.
The rest of the pages in the section are listed below.
Spectrum Analyzer Manufacturers.
RF Power Meter Manufacturers.
OTDR Manufacturers.
Cable Tester Manufacturers.
Protocol Analyzer Manufacturers.
Used Test Gear.

While getting these links off the site I did notice that the page on Cable Testers has no page rank, not sure what is wrong here. The Cable Test page received more hits than five other pages in the section [which is not saying much] over the last 30 days. I see in Webmaster tools that no other external page links to it, that would effect the page rank.
Looking at last years data, these three pages did not even receive 1 visit per day [less then 365 page hits]:
LXI Test Gear, Thermal Chambers, and Frequency Counters......

Internet Browser Wars

Seems with the issue of the new flaw found in Internet Explorer I went out and checked which browser was being used most to access the web site. Well IE still gets used the most, but it looks like it's down another 3%, with Google Chrome inching up another few percentage points.
But that's nothing like I'm reading on the web about the large increase in downloads of Firefox. However most of my visitors come from the US and I think most of the recent Firefox downloads were in Germany and France [which had recommended dumping MS IE].
I also see that version 3.6 of Firefox is ready for download, so I'll do that now. I'm using 3.5.7 and sometimes it would hang for maybe 45 seconds? ~ That went well....

I did check how a few pages were doing, both speaker related. Neither page is doing well.
Mechanical Speakers. Companies that produce speakers, with out a case or speaker box.
Computer Speakers. Companies that make computer speakers or AV Speakers.
Both of these pages have been on the internet for years now.

Web Statistics Increasing

I really don't want to keep blogging about the same topic over and over again, but. The web site just received more than 10,000 visits in a single day. Yesterday the interface bus web site received 10,126 visits. That's up from maybe 9,500 visits last week and 8,500 visits last month.
That's the first time the site ever received over 10,000 visits in a single day. So this year should see two to 400,000 more visits than last year, and last year was the highest ever......

As normal, here are a few pages that are not recieving many pageviews and were never listed in the 'What's new blog'. All related to equipment cases.
This would be one of the few times I list a page with up-dating it. Each of these links looked ok, so no updates for now. The topics should be the main reason for low page views, but I do expect many more page views for the Transit case page. How many people would look up Captive screws?
Manufacturers of Transit Cases. Equipment cases used for transport.
Manufacturers of ATCA Chassis. Telcom equipment chassis.
Chassis Card Guide Manufacturers. PWB Card Guides.
Captive Screw Manufacturers. Captive screws for equipment.
Equipment Chassis Specifications. Spec document numbers and titles.

Oh the highest number of page views in Jan 2009 was 8,415 pageviews. Or an increase of 1,700 page views this year over last.

Graphic; Rack mount power inverter.

Blu-ray disk player recomendation

I think it's finally time to purchase a Blu-ray disk player. Not really sure why I've been waiting so long. Of course when the players first came out they were over priced, but that was a while ago.

Some time later I heard that Blu-ray players took forever to boot the movie up, which stopped me from making any purchased. Now I see that they want to increase Blu-ray disk storage space from 25GB to 33.4GB. However it appears that any Blu-ray player would require a firmware upgrade. I also see that by next year there will be 3D Blu-ray players, which also tells me that I would also need a 3D TV [what ever that is] and 3D movies. The 3D Bluray specification was released in December 2009.

I assume I want a Bluray player that plays a number of formats
~ BD Live; Netflix-ready; Pandora-ready; Blockbuster-ready; plays BD-ROM, BD-R, BD-RE, DVD-R, DVD-RW, CD-R, CD-RW discs

Interfaces Required
HDMI,
DVI,
USB,
Component Video,
Ethernet, for the Internet.
Not that I would ever use one but;
Internet Connect-able.

Interfaces not required
S-Video, the interface is outdated.
Firewire, not realy used by any one.

Now it my seem a bit odd but I would also like to stay with Sony. A lot of my gear is already Sony, so it kind of makes it easy getting the remote to work. Plus my remote is a Sony Remote Commander [RM-AV3000]. Now the remote is a little dated now, but I see no reason to get a new remote, as I already have a dozen other remotes that of course I don't use.

Pageview Counter Data

I happened to be updating the Antenna Tracking System pages.
So I opened up the Pageviews from Google Analytics filtered by 'antenna-tracking'. The first thing I noticed was that those few related pages don't receive many pageviews, maybe 10/day at best. The first recorded page-view received was on September 7 2007. Now that date occurs before I started the Engineering Page Additions blog, so I checked to see if any of the pages were ever mentioned. A few of the pages were listed in regards to a new page addition on Waveguides [post], back in 01/01/09.

So the point is why are these several pages not getting any pageviews and why are the pageviews flat [and low] over the last few years. Just by adding the links below I see one problem, as a few of the pages only have one manufacturer.
Antenna Tracking Systems; Main section page.
.... Antenna Towers;
....  RF Amplifiers; High Power Amps.
.... Antenna Controllers; Positioning Gear.
.... Light Antenna Pedestals; 
.... Medium Antenna Pedestals;
.... Heavy Duty Antenna Pedestals;  
...... Waveguides; .
The first thing I did was update a few of the pages, by adding new manufacturers. However I could not up-date all the pages because I could not find many companies making antenna pedestals. Companies want to produce systems, not just pedestals.

The second thing was to add the page addresses in this blog posting. I'm not saying that so many people read this blog that the page views will increase. But that Google will see an external link and may give the page more importance.

Oh, and by up-dating the page I showed Google that the pages are 'fresh'. You may have noticed when doing a search that Google postings show the date [listed on the page] that it was last updated. That fact tells me that Google is looking at this date, and may be taking note of the date.

So I added the pages in 2007, blogged about some of them in 2009, and now re-listed them in 2010 and corrected a number of short comings. I even added two more page to page links on the site.

Graphic; a Servo control unit.

Anchor Text

I'm out looking over Google's Webmaster Tools for the web site [Interface Buses]. I found a few issues with Short meta descriptions or Duplicate meta descriptions. Normally these HTML issues are caused because while generating a new page I copy a related current page. So I fixed most of them, the ones left are redundant pages.

The tools also give me a list of all the pages on my site and who links to them, or how many different pages link to them. I'll list a few pages here that only have a few incoming page links.

It was the Anchor text I really wanted to blog about. The Anchor Text is the HTML link on a page that points to another page. You always want to select a descriptive word or phrase. But I'm looking at this Anchor list and I see three people using the phrase 'here', another three pages using the term 'link', 'this', '1' and so on.

Now I don't control how someone links to one of my pages, but I can control how I link to internal pages. I see a few links here I may have used by mistake, like 'read more' or 'definition'.
SEO hint, when you find these trade them out for a better phrase.
Definition of Cable Armor.
Read more on Twisted Pair Cables.
What is a Gender Changer.

This is blog posting number 500

Comparing Visitors

Just a short posting showing visitors for the first week in January for this year and last year. The site has not made it back to 9,500 visits/day yet but I would think that will happen this week. Visits are up several hundred on the week ends and about 1000 on the week days. There are still more Electrical Interfaces going obsolete than being generated [as in yesterdays posting]. So any increase in page visits are good. Over 120 pages have already been up-dated so far this year, including these obsolete interfaces;
STD32 Interface.
SpringBoard Expansion.
STEBus.

Graphic; Statistics from AWSTATS.

The Demise of CableCard

Back in December the FCC came out with a media release indicating that CableCard was having only limited success. Other web sites change the phrase 'limited success' to 'total failure' of the CableCard approach pushed by the FCC. In fact back in September of last year the Consumer Electronics Association [CEA] went to the FCC complaining that it didn't appear that CableCard was doing anything for competition. So it seems that CableCard will have a very short life, what two years. Really zero years, I don't have any gear that uses a CableCard and have never even seen one.

One word about why I'm blogging about CableCard, and then I'll move on to re-posting two previous blog entries on the issue [with more back-ground information].

Checking last years analytics data I found that three of the four pages covering CableCard have received less than a dozen page views each for the year. I would expect a few more page views than that for a released standard, so I took notice and wondered why that was.
Here are the three CableCard pages and their visits [they differ only in pin-outs]:
S-Mode CableCard.  14 visits.
M-Mode CableCard.  13 visits.
CEA-679-Mode CableCard.  11 visits.

Blog Posting [10/5/06 CableCard]:    
CableCARD from what I have found so far is a 16-bit PC Card in a PCMCIA format. CableCARD was designed to replace the cable box from the cable company; any company could produce a CableCARD from the standard so you were not locked into renting from the cable company. This was the FCC.

CableCARD appears as a PCMCIA slot on the back of HDTV sets.

Any how version 1.0 came out last year [2005] from I understand and has a few draw backs. Information only flows one-way with CableCARD. So with CableCARD you are not able to use Pay-per-view because the card only receives signals from the cable company it does not send information out to them. Seems like a lot of people are already waiting for CableCARD 2.0 to come out to address the short comings of version 1.0.

So CableCARD from a hardware view is just another implementation of the PCMCIA card. Why they used the out-dated PC Card interface escapes me.

Blog Posting [8/27/07 CableCard]:  

I was out looking at Digital TV's on-line, up-dating the web sites listing for CableCard. This is a PCMCIA slot and PCMCIA card, a tuner card that can be inserted into a slot in the TV to replace a cable set-top box. Some TV descriptions indicate the term CableCard, while others indicate Digital Cable Ready [see below]. I was only able to find a few HDTV units from Hitachi which came with a CableCard slot. I see a few from Sony too. The CableCard allows the user to plug cable directly into a TV set without the need for a set-top box [STB]. CableCard slots may also be found on Digital Video Recorders [DVR]

Version 1 of CableCard was 'one-way' only so with out the cable decoder box things like 'pay-per-view' was unavailable. Version 2 released in June of this year should be fixing this problem [I have not yet reviewed it]. As of July 07 according to an FCC ruling; cable companies now have to supply set-top boxes that come with a removable CableCard. The ruling may bring CableCard back from the dead.

As far as PCs with a CableCard slot ~ forget it [for now]. CableCard interfaces are only available on Windows Vista machines and only with new OEM PC purchases. So you can't go to a store and purchase an up-grade to add CableCard, it has to be bundled with a new PC. Here's a quote;

"AMD's Digital Cable Tuner will only be available from PC manufacturers, and then only with a new Vista PC. There are no plans for support on Windows XP, nor are there any plans to sell the Digital Cable Tuner as a standalone product. "CableLabs has to know about every single system manufactured," ..... "They require full encryption and content protection, which means it's bound to Windows Media Center." HP has one: Digital Tuner-equipped m8010y.

Digital Cable Ready [DCR], this attribute describes a TV that incorporates a CableCARD slot to facilitate the reception of one-way digital cable content (which may include analog, digital, high-definition and/or premium programming) without the need for a set-top box. A CableCARD is typically provided for a nominal monthly fee by the cable provider. Sets may also use the term Digital Cable Turner.

So the CableCard standard was released in 2005, with only a few products available by 2007, crushed in 2009 and I assume no longer supported in any new product by 2010 [never being used by anybody]. However it is still mandated by the FCC, so they would have to change their rules.....

Webalizer Stats

It may be over a year now, but I finally pulled up the report by Webalizer today. Webalizer is a server side stats counter that just gathers data about how many times a web page is viewed. It's ok for a counter but I like AWSTATS better. AWSTATS is also a server side counter, but I have both set up and running.

Some of the visit data shown in these posts is from AWSTATS, but most of the graphics are from Google Analytics [which does not reside on the server]. Oh non of the three counters agree, they all differ by a few percentage.

What I wanted to do is post the visits per hour for the web page [from Webalizer]. The site is an 'engineering portal' type site for electrical engineers.
The odd thing I see in the data is that most of the visits occur around 8am, while I would think that most of the visits should occur later in the day when the entire country is awake. Most of the page visits to the website are from the US, so why wouldn't most of the traffic occur after 1pm?
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Google Sites [Nofollow]

Although I do like Google Sites I did want to mention one particular issue with using the free service, which some people may find important. But first a few good things about Google Sites.

First off Google Sites is free to use, there are no fees or costs involved with the service.
Second, it's easy to generate web pages ~ like this one [ http://sites.google.com/site/interfacebus/Home ].
I think they call them web pages, unlike a web site. I assume because you can only integrate the web pages together in a particular way. Of course you can upload and integrate pic files and text.
Finally you can use your Adsense code, or run Google Ads.

So what is the problem with Google Sites; well Google does not follow the links on the site. Every link you add to your web pages gets a HTML tag called no-follow [ rel=nofollow ]. The nofollow tag tells every search engine not to follow your link and in Google's case not to give the page it points to any Page Rank.

You can use the site to generate and run a web page, but you can not use the site to promote another web site [with a search engine]. So you can start a web page there and point your visitors to another web site, but you can't point any search engine to a different site because the links don't work.

Last year I would have advised someone just starting out to begin with Google Sites, just to get off the ground and get a Page Rank. Now because you can't pass a Page Rank, I would advice people to bit the bullet and buy a web address and rent server time.  It's just pointless to spend time working a web page if it doesn't help with Page Rank for any other web page generated sometime later. The best example; you want web presence now and six months later you come up with a business name. When you do buy that web address [your-site.com] no one points to it and it has a zero page rank [so you start from scratch again].

Now when Google Knol started they also used the nofollow tag for the first three months. However because of so many complaints they dropped it several months in. So now links from any Google Knol you write do work with search engines. Example Knol I started on Component Derating.

Graphic; Panel Mount LED, Red color.

Increasing Page Visits

Yesterday had 8,513 visits or about what October had for page visits. So they are starting to make a come back over the last few weeks. November saw around 9,000/day while December had around 9,500/day [before the holidays]. I'm hoping to get back to normal by next week.

This December was the highest Dec. ever, as high-lighted by the red lines on the chart. Even better, December was higher than many other months last year which is not the norm.

I'm still looking at sections of the site that did not receive a minimum of 365 page views. I'm not sure when these following pages were added, maybe this year. Note that I'm taking the first definition on each page.

SEO Hint; Sometimes you want to link to a page using the same term [resistor Definitions] while other times you may want to link to a page with a relevant but less common term [used here].
Network Resistor Definition. 155 page views
Ohm Definition. 177 page views
Phenolic Molded Resistor. 274 page views
Quick Connect Resistor. 298 page views
Damping Resistor. 334 page views
Semiconductor Resistor. 337 page views
If you continue to use the same term or phrase to link to a page, Google sees the phase as important to that page. However; if you pick different terms than Google sees each of those terms as relevant [but less important] to the page. Ever see a page returned from a Google search that indicates [in the Google frame], the term was only found in links pointing to this page.... I'm still using terms found on the pages.

Graph; Data per month from AWSTATS 1/01/06 to 12/31/09.

2009 Web Stats

As reported by Google Analytics interfacebus received 2,245,193 visits with 4,082,072 page views.

Greatest amount of visitors outside the US; India: 154,048 visits.

Source with the largest amount of visitors; Wikipedia: 25,268 visits.

Bandwidth used on the server; 11.11 G Bytes.

Worst web pages [low visits]:
2N4931 Temp derating.
2N6764 Temp Derating.
2N6770 Temp Derating.

Top three browsers used;
Internet Explorer 55.25%
Firefox 34.39%
Chrome 3.81%
That the highest I've seen Firefox at, or the lowest that MS Explorer has been.

Graphic; Web visits over the last five years.

End of Year up-date

I first posted this chart on the 16th, but I wanted to post it again with the new data. It's one day short of the data for the year, but I don't except to see that many visitors today. The important point is that 2009 brings in the most web visits at around 2,436,499 visits [graph], and 4,077,367 page views.

The what's new blog [new Engineering Pages] has 67 entries which indicate at a minimum 67 new pages were added to the web site this year. But because in many cases more than one page is mentioned there could be as many as 80 new pages this year.

Although most of the time I only make some small formatting change to a web page, it still counts as an update; there have been 366 different pages updated this month, and 464 pages updated in November. The point is that the website [interfacebus] is always being updated.

I'm still troubled by the number of pages only receiving a minimum number of page visits per year. Here are just a few;
Companies making electronic equipment.
Definition of Interference.
Industrial  Board Formats.
MIL-39009 Resistor Derating.
GPIB Connector -55138 CID.

Chart: AWSTATS, Number of Visits per year for 2005 to 2009.

Interest in Personal Computer Buses

I figured I would post a few pages that have seen a reduction in page views from this year to last.

The page covering the USB interface had a reduction of 0.12%, which is nothing.

Now the PCIe page had a reduction of 17.20%, which is not good. The PCI express interface is still the fastest interface on the PC so I'm surprised to see a drop in visits that high. However it looks like much of the drop occurred in the first six months of this year, it started to make a come back after that.

The SATA interface also had a 3.23% drop from last year. Again this is a new interface which should still have some interest, so I would expect more page views.

The older Hard drive interface [IDE] also had a drop of 30.98%. The Parallel IDE interface [PATA] is obsolete so I would expect a drop in page views here, but maybe not that high. There should still be many computer users that run this older bus style. You would thing this would be the time people start looking up data on the bus as they begin to suffer hard drive problems.

Also had a 19.86% reduction in page views for the FireWire Bus. However I think I can under stand this reduction. I think I wrote something about some Apple computers not even shipping with the Firewire interface any longer. I've never even had a Firewire product.

Yet another obsolete PC bus, the RS232 interface also had a 6.48% drop from last year. I don't think I have any RS232 gear any longer, for a few years now. I still see RS232 ports on new PCs, which continues to surprise me.

Last one, for now, the PCI bus showed a 27.86% reduction in page views. I would like to say this interface is obsolete too, but I can't because there are many PC cards produced in the PCI format. Many card functions can't be purchased in the PCIe format. I think the PCI slot will be on motherboards for years to come.

So interest in topics comes and goes over time. Remember that the search engines are always re-ordering their results too. So some of these drops could be due to sliding down lower in the search results. The chart shows around a 20% increase in page-views over the last few months.

Graphic; PageViews [per week] so far this year.

There are 30,442 pages in the list I'm reading off Google Analytics, but there are only around 1,600 pages on the web site. The rest of those pages are search pages or mis-spelled [404] pages. This site does not have 30,000 different web pages. I should have cleaned that up a bit and re-typed that text.

Low page views

With the end of the year just a few days away I figured I would get in one more posting showing pages that received less than 365 pages views, or less than one hit a-day. There are many more than just the three or four I'll post today. I think I'll post pages that received less than 100 page views;

Chassis Panel Meters. 99 page views
Chassis Terms. 88 page views
ESD Terms. 77 page views
Radar Terms. 66 page views
Compliance Testing. 55 page views
OEM Manufactures. 43 page views
iSCSI Protocol. 33 page views
2N6546 Temp Derating. 22 page views
CableCard. 10 page views
And the list could go on, many of the pages [under 10 pageviews] in my list are just mis-spelled web addresses. Of course many new pages also have a low page view. There were about 138 pages that received between 50 and 100 page views. Maybe another 200 pages that received less than 50 hits.
Pageviews so far this year 4,054,604.

Java Script Disabled in Broswer

I've been off-line much of the time for the last two days. Well half the web was working but most every thing to do with Google would not function at all. Or after restarting a web browser some Google pages would load while others would not. In fact even if a page would load, as soon as I changed pages it would freeze.

To me it appeared that much of Google was off-line, but I could close and re-open the browser and the pages would [sometimes] work, until I changed pages.

At first it looked like an issue with AVG, I had just up-graded to version 9 the week before. I also noticed that AVG had loaded a browser add-on called Safe Search which I wasn't to happy about. So I removed the add-on and things appeared to work in both Firefox and Explorer, but not in Google Chrome.

So I removed the last program that was loaded; Adobe Flash Player. Adobe was upgraded on Dec 25 which is when I started seeing the issue. I assume it was a corrupt install, because I downloaded it again and things still work.

So; Re-install Flash Player if it looks like Javascript is not functioning. Don't bother searching the web, because it appears that thousands of people have the same or similar issues. The only thing you get out of the forums is one post about a program not working and hundreds of follow-up posts of 'me too'.

Removing a Broswer add-on:
Windows Explorer help; select Tools / Internet Options / Programs / Manage add-ons / Disable AVG Safe Search.

I also disabled the add-on Bonjour from Apple.

New Page Generation and Page Views

Figured I would look back over the year and check how a few of the new pages were doing. Most of these relate to Equipment Chassis stuff. There were many other new pages started over this last year, but these all relate to the same topic.

These numbers are really low, but that could just mean the topics will not bring in any traffic. So it might seem nice to generate a new page to bring in some traffic, just don't get your hopes up.

Cable Harness, Aug 16 2009, 220 page views
Equipment Cable Runs, Aug, 11 2009,  385 page views
 Equipment Rack Grounding, July 31 2009, 277 page views
Chassis Cable Retractors, May 21 2009, 145 page views 
Chassis Power Modules,  April 29 2009, 523 page views
Chassis Wire Selection,  April 29 2009, 286 page views
EPIC Express Cards, Jan 6 2009, 72 page views.

The numbers don't look so great, maybe one or two page views a day. The EPIC card has issues with just being new on the market, if there are any products at all.

Oh, so far interfacebus has 4,017,965 page views this year [regardless of these new pages].
SEO recommendation; keep generating new pages. Even if the new pages don't generate many new page views, you still may bring in new site visitors [which may come back].
Graphic; Chassis panel mount push button.

SEO Best Practices and Tips

So first I took a look at the pages that receive the lowest page views. Most of these are new pages, so it's ok that they receive a low amount of views. However some pages are much older but still receive no page views;

This one is a new page generated in October, still no Pagerank and just 11 page views?
PWB Types. It has an internal link and two external links, one from the sitemap, and one from the 'Whats new blog' Definition of PWB Terms. There is little else I can do but wait either for more page views or maybe a Pagerank.

This next page is more than a  year old about Operating Temperature of a 2N2906 transistor. Looks like it was just updated last month [not that I recall]. Again no page-rank but it has multiple internal links and at least one external link. The point is that you can't make people visit your page, no matter how much work you put into it. I assume the pagerank went to zero because Google knows no one ever views the page. Or the text is to similar to another page on my site.

Along the same lines, I'll also check the number of incoming External links; this related page only has 3 external links: Derating an NPN Transistor. This particular page has a ranking of one, again more than a year old. Yet one more; no page rank and only 33 page views [Derate a 2N3765].

I spent a ton of time generating these derating pages and they never generated any traffic.

So what can you do to get a page working. First I just updated two of the pages. Second, I added a new external link to the pages via this blog posting. Finally I generated a new way to find the pages via the text on this page, or via the graphic I attached here. Oh you may have missed it but I also linked to an internal page of the other blog, that way those pages just don't go to a zero page rank after a few months.

The other thing I wanted to mention was that by adding an external link to a page and increasing the pagerank of that page, any page it may link to also sees an increase in pagerank. This last page already has a page rank of two, but only two incoming links. Quick Connect Resistor, now it has 3 links and is associated with the term "Quick Connect". In fact each of these links now associate the page(s) with a new term.

Graphic; Chip resistor, Thermistor, Derating Curve.

Why do I need an XML Sitemap

I really don't know why I need an XML site map for the search engines, but I just generated one. The last sitemap I generated was just about a year ago; the file was always left out on my server. In fact Google would come out and read the sitemap a few times a month.

Any way the XML site map differs from the html sitemap I generated yesterday; the HTML file is for people, while the XML file is for the search engines.

Just like last year I used GSiteCrawer. The program had crashed several months ago and I finally got around to taking a look at it, turns out I just downloaded it again to get it to work.

So the point is why do I need this file? The thing is the file size is 291k bytes and just burns up bandwidth off my server.

As indicated in the 'New Engineering Pages' blog a new page covering Feed-Through Capacitors was added [to interfacebus.com] at 7 PM last night. When I check at 5 AM today, the page had already been indexed by Google. In fact doing a search for that term returns my page at 49 out of 473,000 results. err, I didn't need a site-map to get a new page indexed hours after I wrote it ....

Whatever; Google indicates that 1,607 URLs were submitted [via the XML file] of which 1,481 URLs [pages] are indexed in their results. Now this differs a bit from the copy it replaced which showed 1,859 pages submitted and 1,328 pages indexed ? My computer also indicate more than 1,600 pages.

Anyhow this week I generated a new human readable sitemap and a new machine readable sitemap ~ that's a good thing.

I don't get it, but I would recommend you generate an XML sitemap for your site [if it's a tad large], many of the generators are free to use or download. You don't even have to tell Google, just add a bit of text to your robots.txt file which all the search engines read. My robots text file is blank right now, but only because I didn't want the other search engines downloading a year old file. But the command is: http://www.YOU.com/sitemap.xml ~ a line of text showing the location of the xml file.

I need a few lines of SEO link building:
2N2904 Derating Curve. Transistor
2N2906 Derating Curve. Transistor
2N6760 Derating Curve. Feild Effect Transistor

The graphic above is a test circuit for testing saturated switching time of a transistor.

Site Map

I ran Xenu last night to generate a new sitemap. The file size stated at better than 1.5 Meg and after many hours of work deleting many duplicate entries the size is dropped below 1Meg. I'm hoping to get it uploaded tonight, which would go well with this posting.

Of course I was doing other things as well; I added a few words to the Knol on Solid State Drives. Of course I added to the blog ~ with this posting. I also updated a few pages, which is normal;
RF Component vendors.
RF Power Divider vendors.
RF Phase Shifters, and so on just to name a few.
Google was telling me that the Phase Shifter page had a short meta description, so I updated a few RF pages.

Graphic; Google Analytics / Map Overlay / Continent view.
Oh the map shows visits, but there have been 3,950,080 page-views so far this year.

Copyright Issues yet again

Google keeps coming out with new tools and so on. Using these new options I found two more web sites that were coping my data. I emailed the first website last week, and the data has already been removed. I only just e-mailed the second site today and I have yet to hear back. A third site appeared to be using data from interfacebus, but the screen showed 'Domain gone' or what ever.

With all the computers Google uses they already know [I would assume] when a page has been copied. I've never seen a 'copied' page appear above mine in the Search Engine Pages [SEPs]. So in some way it really doesn't benefit a person coping the data, because you will always appear lower down the page. But I guess, if you have nothing to say [or write] than a copied page bets out a blank page.Anyway I have a few pages that need a bit of help;
Battery Control ICs.
Voltage Controlled Regulator ICs.
Charge Pump ICs.

The chart [Web Statistics] was first posted November 8th and 2009 PageViews were looking a tad low. Now this year is only lagging by 4000 pageviews from 2007 ~ with 15 days to go. So this year will be the highest year ever. I estimate over a 100,000 yet to hit the site. Oh, the site receives much more than 4000 pageviews a day.

Google Knol

Figured I would take a look at how Knol was doing these days.
Looks like about 2,012 visits from 102 countries over the last 3 months. Unfortunately I only added a counter just about 3 months a go. However Knol indicates about 20,922 page views so far, after about a year and a half. The important metric to me is the number of people that get sent over to interfacebus; only 738 people this year.

The knol with the largest pageviews relates to computer buses [IEEE1284 to name just one]. The second highest visited page covers the RS232 bus, while the third page covers the SD Card. The most recent page under development covers Temperature Derating.

Any of the Knols can be reached from this page; Computer Buses. Which by the way showed up one listing above a link from interfacebus.com.
Graphic' Knol page-views for the last thirty days.

How to get more external page links

This sort of follows yesterdays post on page-views. This time the topic is on external page links. An external link is a site other than interfacebus that links to a particular page.

A page with low external pages linking in will receive a low page rank, and so will receive a lower amount of visits. So this is a list of a few pages with only one external page link, and that also has a page rank of zero [in most cases]. In most if not all cases the only external link pointing to the site would be the sitemap for this website.
Definition of Antenna Terms. ['P']
Definition of Radar Terms.
Engineering Acronyms. [He]
Dictionary of Terms.
Capacitor Terms.
VXI Board Manufacturers.
Data Highway.
And on and on it goes. I'm not sure why so many pages now have only one external link. I'll need to keep watching this issue.

So by listing a few of these pages here, they receive another incoming external link. Maybe some day they may even also receive a page rank. Of course if they do get a page rank than they may pass some of that page rank to another page that they point to.

The graphic is Visits from Denmark, so far this year [because of the Global Warming meeting].

Comparing Pageviews

Back in October I blogged about the number of pages receiving some amount of page views. Here's the update compared to that last post.

140,000 to 149,999: 1 page
110,000 to 139,999: 0 page
100,000 to 109,000: 1 page
90,000 to 99,999: 0 pages
80,000 to 89,999: 1 page
70,000 to 79,999: 0 pages
60,000 to 69,999: 1 page
50,000 to 59,999: 0 pages
40,000 to 49,999: 4 pages
30,000 to 39,999: 3 pages
20,000 to 29,999: 14 pages
10,000 to 19,999: 59 pages
1,000 to 9,999: 509 pages
100 to 999: 849 pages
1 to 99: 400 pages [estimate]


I don't see any thing that pops off the page. The increase in pageviews below 100 increased, but that would be due to new page additions. I don't recall adding 50 new pages, but that is the only section that is hard to count [so it's an estimate]. 


Still 350 pages that only received less than 100 hits for a year is a lot; more than 50 will top the 100 mark by the end of the year. Another 50 or so of the new pages should top 100 by next year end, so that still leaves 300 pages that will never see more than 100 page views a year?


Sections that come to mind; [that will never see more than 100 hits]

Index of Manufacturers [this particular page received 49 page views]. Number of effected pages; 30+

FET Derating Curve [this particular page received 46 page views]. Number of effected pages;15+
Interface Buses Index  [this particular page received 46 page views]. Number of effected pages;12
MIL-STD-100  [this particular page received 45 page views]. Number of effected pages;7
Transistor Derating Curves  [this particular page received 31 page views]. Number of effected pages;20+


So that was another 100 or so, maybe another 100 that are single page additions ~ which leaves 100 pages unaccounted for. So no matter what I do some number of pages will never see any hits, but I don't know that when I generate them.

URL Appraisal Results for interfacebus.com

I was just out checking on a unrelated web site on the internet, just to see what was up with it. One of the search results was from a page that does URI appraisals, or internet name value. I just had to plug in my name, the other site showed a value of $7,000.

Their appraisal indicated a Site Worth of $51,049.40 [calculated to the penny?]
Domain Created Date: 2000-10-04
Domain Age: 9 Years, 64 Days
Google PageRank: 5
Overall Site Ranking: 122,669
Unique Monthly Visitor Estimate: 13,923
Alexa Ranking: 161,376
Google Inlinks: 0 [looks like it returned zero results]
Google Pages: 1,850
Yahoo Inlinks: 9,992
Yahoo Pages: 2,180
Marketability; 
.... Top Level Domain: GREAT 
.... Undesirable Characters: GREAT (0 Total) 
.... Overall Length: OK (12 Length)

The Alexa data looked lower then normal [lower is better] so I went out and checked them too. The pic file is Daily Reach; the lower the number the better. The other number provided by Alexa is Traffic Rank, also the lower the better. Traffic Rank was the number given above by the other site.
7 Day 133,441 [-19,546]
1 Month 133,698 [-61,749]
3 Month 159,448 [-34,218]
Oh that appraisal value is only for the web name, not the money it could earn.

Increasing Web Visits

Starting last month the number of visits to interfacebus started to exceed 9,000 per day. Ten of the 21 week days saw numbers over 9,000 visits. In fact, not counting this month, all of the highest numbers for any given day occurred last month. Most of the numbers centered around 9,300 or so.

The numbers for this month are already around 9,700 or four to five hundred visits higher than the highest day last month.

Here's a new way to look at the numbers, to compare month to month over the last few years. Over the last few months the number of visits have been increasing. Like any other posting I can't really tell what pages are seeing an increase, only because there's just to many different pages.