By using English phonics, you can eliminate many of the complications of learning to speak Mandarin. Native English speakers no longer need to trudge through the old fashioned and ineffective Wade-Giles method, or struggle with the current, but just as difficult Pinyin Chinese to speak Mandarin. There’s an easier way! Words and phrases can be sounded out exactly the same way we learned to read and speak English in grade school.
The Romanization of Chinese Characters
Mandarin Pinyin is called Putonghua, or The Common Language, and is widely used throughout China. Its four tones, level, rising, falling, and high rising, distinguish many words and syllables with the same consonants and vowels but with different meanings. It deciphers the Chinese characters and symbols into a Romanized alphabet, eliminating the abstract strokes completely unrecognizable to foreigners.
Prior to the use of Pinyin, westerners depended upon the Wade-Giles Romanization system that was initially invented to simplify Chinese characters into their English counterparts. British scholar Sir Thomas Francis Wade created the method, and it was later modified by Herbert Allen Giles in 1912, and it became the preferred transliteration method among scholars. But what it truly gave the western world was a systematic and consistent method of butchering the Chinese language through mispronunciations for more than a half century. Why did it fail so miserably? Learners of Mandarin relied upon the pronunciation guide, but were seldom educated properly on how the system worked. Inevitably, most words were grossly mispronounced.
Other attempts were made to integrate a Latin alphabet for the Mandarin language during the 1920’s and 30’s, but most were unsuccessful. Finally, in 1985, the Pinyin Romanization system officially replaced the Wade-Giles method. The Chinese government’s commitment to promote a standardized Latin alphabet for westerner and the country’s minorities promoted the adoption of Pinyin Putonghua, and it is used extensively throughout the country.
Unfortunately, native English speakers who study Mandarin quickly discover that many of the vowels and consonants used in Pinyin are pronounced differently than their English counterparts. This means that English speakers, who have been trained since primary school to sound out words phonetically, first need to learning Chinese via Pinyin in order to speak correctly and clearly in Chinese.
A Better Way
The good news is that there is an easier and faster way of learning Chinese. Native English speakers can by-pass Pinyin and immediately concentrate on reading and speaking Chinese by using the familiar English phonics system. For example, the Chinese word for ‘next’, when written in Pinyin is: xi ay i ge. Using English phonetics, you would say: shee-ah ee guh. Congratulations! You have just pronounced the word correctly! So as you can see, if you are searching for a simple way to speak Chinese effectively, the English phonetic system makes the learning process an easily attainable goal.
Excerpts from the conversation between two ardent fans of Jackie Chan. Fan 1:” seen the latest flick?” Fan 2:”nooo, I missed the last show; there’s no other movie hall left.” Fan 1: “God man! You missed something amazing. You have to wait till it comes out on DVD now, hard luck.” Fan 2: “Yeah! Wish I could speak Chinese, wouldn’t have to wait for the dubbed version then. ” Collective sigh!
Wait there people, no need to sigh now. Your wish can be fulfilled at this instant. This is not an advertisement for one of the many online programs for learning Chinese. This is an offer to learn to read and write in china, brandishing you with the real experience.
Now why should you be interested to study in China? Good question. With an equally good answer. For starters, it is the most sought after language coming in the second place after English. In fact, almost 1/4th of the globe speaks it. Although there are many dialects owing to variations in tone, the most common is the Mandarin dialect. Also known as the official language of china, more than 50% of the population converse in it.
Chinese although considered as a tough nut to crack, is surely an interesting one, rich in history and structure. Chinese characters are fun to decipher and look quite attractive in writing. One only gets to learn more about the ideology and thinking process involved behind.
One also gets to learn and visit the culture of a country whose roots date back to more than a 1000 years old. It’s castles, palaces; monuments prove as a viewer’s delight.
More than this, there’s a business aspect also attached to it. Students looking for lucrative jobs in china can find it really handy to be well versed in the local dialect. Rapid growth of china in the global economy over the years has only helped in opening new doors to the world. One can try out for the international relations, business government, information technology, travel and tourism, teaching, translation etc.
Seeing the ongoing trend, many study programs are being offered by various universities and organizations in collaboration. CSA, being the leading company has tied down with 25 universities across china including the Peking University. They offer a variety of study programs at various intervals, summer, fall, spring or full study programs. There are custom and volunteer programs also available to suit your needs. In addition, they take care of your accommodation, medical insurance, guided tours across the cities, events to interact with natives, housing facilities with the local families or young professionals for proficiency in Chinese.
Learning Chinese has never been looked more favorable before and even though you might not want to pursue a career in it, still you can have the upper hand whenever you go to a Chinese restaurant over your friends’ right!!
It can be hard for many companies to justify the cost of a monthly Search Engine Optimization contract. Bottom line: it makes sense to hire a solid SEO with proven knowledge. That’s why good SEO’s stay working – they get results and justify their cost.some tasks that it makes sense for you to handle in-house, and the mark of a good SEO will be one who points these out to you from the beginning.
1.Get involved with link building. One of the tasks your SEO will probably be performing for you is gaining links pointing to your site from others. Links are an important factor in search engine ranking algorithms. Having your SEO build links for you is fine, but you may want to consider approaching certain link partners yourself. Remember that there is a human being on the other end – in the case of link building it’ll be someone running a website relevant to your own. Use your networking skills to initiate a friendly email exchange. Explain how you can help each other out by trading links. You might make new business contacts while you’re at it, and they might be more receptive to an email from you than one from an SEO or marketer.
2.Ensure the separation of paid and organic referrals in analytics data. One great way to muddy analytics data is to run paid search advertisements like AdWords during an ongoing seo services . While this is fine when the proper precautionary steps are taken, the result can be inaccurate and misleading data. If you’re planning on running paid search advertisements yourself let your SEO know ahead of time. They should be able to help isolate the paid search data in your analytics so organic referral numbers won’t be convoluted
3.Do some of your own copywriting. The bottom line is that nobody knows your business better than you do. If someone asked you to explain why your product or service offerings are better than the competition you could probably talk their ear off. Crack your knuckles and churn out some content – with your SEO’s guidance, of course. Let your SEO give you a theme (usually a keyword phrase), and generate at least a rough draft for them. They may need to tweak it here or there, but it’ll save on their time and your budget significantly
Nearly every organized organization in the world has a website. From grassroot community groups to major corporations, the World Wide Web has expanded by billions of websites over the past half decade. Because the medium is easy, cheap and absurdly flexible, it has become the backbone of a “people’s global communications network”.
Large companies are just now starting to recognize the wisdom behind a full spectrum approach to search engine marketing and the marching orders seem to have gone out to the marketing divisions. There has been a notable increase in both SEO/SEM outsourcing and in-house hiring of search marketers over the past few months. Before embarking on a major search marketing campaign, large companies should consider a number of options, obligations and potential obstacles. Once you know you want to embark on an SEO services campaign, you should know you will need to budget sufficient resources to support it.
March like ducks…
Ensuring everyone shares an understanding of their roles and responsibilities in regards to the website is an essential first step. Many corporate websites are now designed to provide a direct conduit to consumers as opposed to acting as a simple brochure site. Examples include the travel sector, large retailers, home electronics and the home entertainment industry. In the past five years, each of these sectors has transitioned from typical brochure websites to direct-to-consumer information/sales sites, and businesses in each of these sectors rely on a number of different people performing different tasks in the organization. This is why many firms are starting to hire a SEO consultant or bring on an in-house specialist. Internal education is the key to turning your SEO from a harried cat-herder into a mellow mother-duck.
Listen to your genius…
As the separate but similar fields of SEO and SEM are both becoming more complicated, good practitioners need good support networks. Many SEOs working for large organizations spend most of their time teaching sales, marketing, finance and legal departments about SEO. Sales and marketing personnel need to learn how to write search engine friendly content. Finance needs to understand the intricacies of bid-per-click systems and the necessity to make funds available.
After hiring an SEO consultant, it is important to actually listen to the genius you’ve hired. As a moderator in a SEO web forum geared for techies, I read about a number of experiences from both in-house and contracted SEO and SEM practitioners who just can’t seem to get the various departments to listen to them.
One brilliant search engine optimization who was hired by a large east-coast firm lamented that work she performed one week would be consistently written over the next. She would complain about it to her boss (who managed the IT division), but the problem persisted for months until something was done. Not only was this demoralizing for the SEO, it obviously prevented the site from achieving as many strong rankings as it could have if the over-writes had not been made. As it turned out, someone in the marketing department was updating based on information from the wholesale purchasing manager and it wasn’t dealt with until a new corporate policy was devised and debated, months into what should have been a strong SEO campaign. What the marketing and purchasing departments failed to grasp is unlike an easily changeable paid search advertising campaign like Overture or AdWords, getting strong organic (free) listings requires patience. Strong communication between the SEO and all divisions responsible for onsite content is also required.
Give the SEO time to perform
Time expectations can be frustrating for SEOs when working with corporate organizations. While paid-advertising can offer a virtually instant road to the front page of a search engine, organic results take weeks or even months to achieve. These results can only come after the SEO has had time to perform his or her initial optimization work on the site and has seen site modifications uploaded to the server. Once the original optimization work is uploaded, it might take up to three months to see a Top10 placement. For very large sites, chances are the SEO will do their hardest initial work on the index page and the main pages of each section in the site while giving the internal pages a light SEO update.
A measure of success
The last basic element a large organization needs to have in place before embarking on an SEO campaign is a way to measure the success of that campaign. There are some in the SEO/SEM industry who insist the only measurement is return on investment.
Return on investment is probably the most important but least practical of the measurements. Research from within and from outside the SEM industry shows that search marketing is more about branding and recognition than it is about direct sales. Like a television commercial or magazine advertisement, consumers see search results as a form of advertising.
The best measure of short-term success is actual site placements. An SEO is hired to achieve the strongest organic placements possible. SEOs are not in charge of making sales or designing the best possible product to sell to the public. The actual audience for SEOs is a small number of electronic search spiders. Good SEOs can get your site in the Top10 if given sufficient support and resources. That’s what they were hired for and that’s how they would like to be measured in the short-term. In the long run though, most SEOs would agree that their real goal is to increase site traffic by making the site appear more often under an increasing number of keywords.
Why reinvent the wheel? We have all heard this statement time and time again, and all too often it is from an annoying critic or a cheesy salesperson. In the case of Internet Marketing, however, it doesn’t seem so silly since there are not many reliable options for keeping up to date with the latest techniques. After all, you could spend hours in search engine optimization forums, read the plethora of do-it-yourself books and you could still end up with dated material or suggestions that don’t apply to your industry niche… or both! So what is the answer? Look for examples of companies that are currently successful and find out why they are! This can be easier said than done; however, there are definitely some tricks of the SEO trade that can make this type of analysis easier. Now I am going to share with you an outline of how to do your own competitive analysis and how to understand it. This will only provide the basic data, however, I assure you that the following tips will provide you with the information to take more informed decisions with your SEO services campaign.
To begin you must choose a viable competitor. Many of you may already have a clear idea of who your competitors are which will make this simpler. If you don’t, then run searches for your most important keyword phrases on Google (or the search engine of concern) while noting any competitors who appear more than once. With luck you will have quickly identified your competitor(s) of choice to move onto the actual analysis.
If You Can’t Beat Them… Improve on Them!
This competitive analysis will require 4 stages of research; position reporting, search engine saturation, design critique, and link popularity research.
Stage 1: Position Reporting
Now that you know who your competitor is it is time to really get an idea how well they are doing! First write down the first 30 major keywords and phrases that appear in the Meta tags found in the Source (select “View Source” from ‘View’ in Internet Explorer) of the competitor’s Home Page. Now take that list and go to Google and type in each query to see if the competitor has top rankings anywhere within the Top20. I recommend using Excel to document this, it will make analysis easier.
Stage 2: Search Engine Saturation
Just how much of the competitor’s web site has been indexed (read and included) by the search engines? This question is important because the degree of saturation plays an important role in Google’s algorithm. To put it very simply the more pages your site has indexed, the better your chances for top ranking.
Stage 3: Design Critique
This is the most technical stage of all and it will likely require a great deal of time but you will be amazed by the benefits.While considering these techniques, carefully note any these elements that appear to be present. Remember we are trying to find the ‘mix’ that your competitor is utilizing so that you can consider implementing the same while improving upon it.
Stage 4: Link Popularity
“ How many pages are linking to your competitor’s web site? How many are their own pages? ”
Link Popularity (LP) is a crucial consideration when analyzing a competitor. Essentially LP has the power to make or break a web site. The more links pointing to a web site from other related web sites, the more credibility Google perceives the site to have.
What you will likely end up with is a number of external sites linking to your competitor along with many of their own pages showing up as well. To do this you will require a links page within your web site where you can place reciprocal links to the agreeable link provider; this is generally expected by webmasters.
Summary
Now that you have identified the various techniques your competitor is using, try to incorporate the ‘mix’ into your current web site. Pay special attention to the Home Page and focus on these elements in this order of importance: Title Tag, optimization of the first text within your page, implementing a proper Description Tag, carefully remove all barriers to the Spider navigation of your site, and increase the incidences of the Keyphrase(s) within the written copy visible on your page.
By establishing the position of your competition and the techniques used, you should now have a much better concept of what works and what doesn’t when obtaining rankings within your niche. If you have not found the information that you need or you wish to learn much more about your competition please don’t hesitate to contact Webay, our research services are designed to strip bare the techniques that your competitors are using. An advanced competitor analysis can make all the difference in the world for your web site and it will save you the money involved with repetitive SEO because you will know what works!
The main idea behind the concept of separating the content from its presentation is to allow website developers a useful framework to develop their website giving them the ability to change the website’s appearance whenever they like without needing to redo the content structure. This article will explain the rationale behind separating content from presentation.
Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t just one method for implementing this concept. More than that, since the introduction of technologies such as CGI, ASP, and PHP that allow web developers to generate dynamic web pages, a lot of companies have found creative ways to develop their website applications using this concept as their foundation.
Over the past few years, the internet community has been trying to create a set of standards for creating web sites. A new technology called CSS or Cascading Style Sheets has been introduced. There is nothing actually new in the way CSS handles a web page’s presentation. CSS allows the developer to define a style for each html tag element. This is similar to the method developers (programmers) used in the old days when they attached a variable to each html tag defining its style. The major difference is that CSS style definitions can be interpreted by most of the existing browsers available while in the older method the dynamic web page engine performs the interpretation.
The internet standards organization W3C has encouraged the use of CSS by enhancing its ability to control the web page’s look and feel. New style options have been added to the CSS specifications that have not been added to the HTML description language. There’s no doubt that this was a smart move. It’s forced web developers to use CSS to achieve an attractive web page that also supports the principle of content separation. Unfortunately CSS did not find its way into the internet mainstream easily because of compatibility issues with most web browsers. These days CSS is widely supported by most of the major web browsers, while CSS2, an enhanced version of CSS still has serious compatibility issues.
Obviously, the separation of content from its presentation deals not only with the styling aspects, but also with browser compatibility issues. The styling aspects were the first to be handled by web developers and web designers. As the complexity of information technology (IT) systems become increasingly more difficult to maintain, the internet community is looking for a solution that will become a standard so that content can be easily be managed. One goal for this standard is to define a “language” that IT systems can “talk” with each other and exchange information. Large corporations have historically used many different software platforms in their networks to conduct business. Internet based applications can provide a single platform that can act as an intermediary between all of these different systems and allow communication between them.
XML (Extensible Markup Language) has been adopted as a standard to present the content itself. OFX (Open Financial Exchange) is a close relative of XML that has been widely used by financial institutions who have been using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems to transmit orders and invoices over private networks, intranets and the internet for several years.
The need to present the content in a standard way that separates it from any design elements was so urgent that for the first time in software development history all the three major players (SUN, IBM, and Microsoft) actually agreed with each other and XML become a standard almost overnight and was adopted by many content providers and news agencies.
Yet the concept was not fully implemented. CSS handles the styling aspects while XML handles the document content. What about the webpage layout? New websites are been published each day by thousands. Every day millions of new web pages are being added to the internet’s global database. Webmasters have found that changing the page background color or the font color might not be enough to keep their website fresh and polished to compete with other new websites. However, changing the website layout can sometimes involve a lot of effort because it involves modifying the web page source code. XSL was introduced to solve that issue. Consider XSL a set of rules that can describe a web page layout. Combine it with XML (and optionally with CSS) you will get a valid html file.
XSL is very similar in its mechanics as any other dynamic web page generator. Beside the fact that XSL is platform independent, its biggest advantage is that it can be processed on the client side. The web server sends the client the content using XML format and the layout definition using XSL format. By doing that, the load on the web server’s CPU is reduced allowing it to perform other tasks more quickly. However, XSL was not adopted by all the major web browsers. So unlike XML, XSL has not found its way to the market easily.
Before you run back to your desk and start redesigning your website according to these magnificent standards, you should be aware that those technologies are really not needed most of the time. In fact, using them unnecessarily can cause performance problems. CSS usually will not cause your system to slow down. Just try to keep your CSS file as small as possible. Many web developers maintain large CSS files with lots of unused style definitions. Deciding to work with XML is a serious decision. If your website generates dynamic web pages supported by databases like MySQL, adding additional XML functionality will definitely reduce your website performance. Sometimes you won’t have a choice and will need to upgrade your hardware to maintain your website’s performance. There is no rule of thumb for this issue. The decision should be based on each system and its engineering demands. My advice to you is to think two steps ahead. Try to predict what kind of future services your website will be providing. Plan your website properly at stage one and save yourself lots of effort later.
Thanks to the flourishing industry of e-commerce, more individuals are looking to bring their business ventures online. With millions of people surfing the web each minute of the day, the number of potential clients is unlimited. Because the average person does not have access to a server and other network equipment, most of us rely on a web hosting to create our sites. The provider enables your pages to be served to the web, but a domain name is what helps to identify your site and brand your business.
Domains have been a hot commodity since the inception of the internet. Aside from giving people a way to label their website, some have actually been able to profit by selling domain names. Sound intriguing? Of course it does. Now you’re probably thinking of coming up with a clever domain, registering it and then keeping it under lock and key until someone comes along offering the right price. While it’s possible, this is something you should not count on.
To be perfectly honest, most of the best domains have already been taken, whether they’re in use or just sitting there. Squatters purchase several domains on mere speculation. They often go after names of famous companies, brands or individuals. What many of them forget is the critical aspect of intellectual property. Hoping that some big name company will pay them a huge sum of money to use their own trademarked name, they typically end up receiving letters from attorneys threatening to sue them for extortion. This part definitely doesn’t sound good at all.
While you can find yourself in a jam by trying to play the domain game, there are few sensible approaches that can help you profit off the system.
Products and services – The most common method of profiting with your domain is selling products and services. You could do this with your own products, or the products of others. While this approach takes significant marketing efforts, it also tends to be the most rewarding.
Information sites – Even without a product or service to sell, you can still profit from your domain by creating a site rich with informative content. Your revenue would be generated from a proven program such as Google AdSense.
Affiliate programs – You could also use your domain to promote affiliates, preferably in your niche interest. Affiliates may be willingly to compensate you for redirecting your visitors to their site.
Park your domain - Perhaps your domain does has some resale value. There are a number of companies that will let you park your domain on their web servers. In this scenario, you advertise that the domain is for sale, and then split the revenue with the participating company.
Regardless of what approach you take towards profiting with your domain, the key is generating traffic. The more traffic you are able to generate, the better chances you have creating revenue. Think of your domain as a piece of property. The more value you add to it, the more it will be worth.
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