Boosting the Visibility of Your PHP Projects with Data Mining and Business Intelligence

Contents

The Hard Part of Getting Recognition as Open Source Developer

Where Other Developers Are Looking for Open Source Projects?

How to Attract as Many Developers as Possible to Your Open Source Projects with SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

What Keywords Should a Page be Optimized For to Maximize Search Traffic?

Using Data Mining for SEO Business Intelligence

Introducing the 4DUser SEO Business Intelligence Tool

Demo Video of the 4DUser Tool Prototype

Optimizing the Exposure of PHP Classes and Tutorial Articles with Data Mining

How to Benefit from the 4DUser Tool to Optimize your PHP Projects Search Exposure

Conclusion

The Hard Part of Getting Recognition as Open Source Developer

Many developers publish their software projects as Open Source but most of them do not get much visibility because there are too many projects trying to get the attention. Those project developers are not sure what to do to get the other developers.

Some developers try to please community leaders in the hope they promote their projects but that is the hard to get and often does not get much sustainable attention.

Community sites like PHP Classes or even bigger ones like GitHub may be a good channel to expose your Open Source projects but you may still not get much reach if other developers are not looking for projects like yours in these sites.

Where Other Developers Are Looking for Open Source Projects?

If developers are not looking so much for Open Source projects on community sources, where are they looking for?

The answer seems obvious. They are looking for projects where everybody looks for information in general, that is Google.

So if you want to maximize the exposure of your projects you need to optimize the pages of your projects to appear well on Google. The activity to optimize the presence of a Web page or site on Google and other search engines, is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in short.

How to Attract as Many Developers as Possible to Your Open Source Projects with SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?

Users search for projects entering keywords relevant to the problem they have, for instance: PHP PDF Library.

Nowadays search engines are sophisticated and complex, but text on the pages is still the most important factor that is considered to determine if a page is relevant to given keywords that users enter on search engines.

There are other important factors like relevant links from other pages or even other sites, the age of a page since it was published, and reputation of the site on which the page was published.

However, nowadays a just created page of great quality may trump up other existing older pages with many links pointing to them.

What defines quality of a page from the point of view of the search engines is not a well known concept because search engine companies do not disclose much of their algorithms.

However it is safe to assume that the relevance of a page for users searching with certain keywords is an important factor. So it important that either the search keywords appear exactly on the page, or they are synonyms or semantic equivalent to the searched keywords.

What Keywords Should a Page be Optimized For to Maximize Search Traffic?

Optimizing a page for relevant keywords may not be enough. If those keywords are not being searched by many users, you may not get much traffic for a page optimized for those keywords.

So a page must be optimized both for relevant keywords and search volume, I mean the number of users that are searching for it during a month for instance.

Using Data Mining for SEO Business Intelligence

Google provides several APIs that provide you information about the traffic you get to your site. These APIs are very useful because they get you information about traffic coming from Google, keywords the users entered, average position in the search results, and search volume.

Google APIs may tell us what search keywords are driving more traffic to each page but they do not necessarily tell us which keywords are the ones that can drive the maximum traffic if we optimize the pages for them.

Sometimes a page may get some traffic for certain keywords that are listed in a the second page of search results if we optimize the pages for those keywords, they may rise to the first page and get you much more traffic then other keywords that your page is currently better optimized for.

Finding the best keywords that may get you more traffic is a challenge that can be solved by data mining.

Data mining is what we call to a range of methods used to extract relevant information from a set of data values.

Business intelligence is a set of processes that can use data mining among other approaches to optimized the efficiency of a business.

In general, business intelligence processes can be applied to other activities not really related with businesses, like for instance the optimizing the visibility of Open Source projects, which is the subject of this article.

Introducing the 4DUser SEO Business Intelligence Tool

For the last months I have been working on a tool meant to address the needs of Web site owners and professionals that work on SEO.

First let me clarify that this project did not start as a SEO tool. Last year I started a project to help other software developers to be independent and happier by creating their own business based on software products that they will create.

If you are interested to know more about this, you may find more about it watching this short video.

I planned to launch a free workshop and a course for those that want to go in depth. But I realized that more than teaching the theory it would be much better if I could show myself creating a new software product business from scratch and for real, so I can show myself demonstrating how to apply the theory steps in practice.

That was when I decided to create a product for the SEO market. I have been doing the research, created a prototype for the product and will launch the first version soon.

I have been recording several videos with me explaining all the steps, what went right, what went wrong, so I can show these videos later to the course students.

The code name for this SEO tool project is 4DUser, which is For the User in short. This means that the tool will help site owners optimize their sites by making the sites better for the users. This is what search engines value more these days.

Demo Video of the 4DUser Tool Prototype

The way this tool works is mainly to retrieve data from the Google APIs for a certain site or page and make calculations to combine and sort data records to find out for instance which are the keywords that would bring more traffic if you optimized those pages for those keywords.

This is a data mining approach to implement a SEO business intelligence solution for this problem.

For now this may look at this demo video that gives you an idea of how the tool works.

Optimizing the Exposure of PHP Classes and Tutorial Articles with Data Mining

As you may have seen in the video above, now the PHP Classes site has a ranking of packages and tutorial articles according to the traffic they get from Google.

If you look at the left site of blog articles, you can see there is a listing of links to other articles that are typically 2 positions above and below the current article.

The linking between articles of greater interest for the users also helps to get packages and articles to get more exposure, because when users see those links they may also become interested in them.

This article you are reading was just posted, so you may not see it highly ranked yet. But if you look at for instance this other article you can see how it looks like for top featured articles.

How to Benefit from the 4DUser Tool to Optimize your PHP Projects Search Exposure

As you may understand by now, the powers of the 4DUser tool can help you to get more exposure to any page, not just Open Source project pages.

Since this tool is just a prototype, for now it will only work if you are the site owner or you have permission of the site owners to access Google APIs that provide the information for the data mining processes.

So, if you are a developer that posted a package in the PHP Classes site or even posted a tutorial article about it, you can just contact me, so I can use the tool and see how what we can do to improve your page.

Later the tool will provide an API so the PHP Classes site can provide the information about the optimization suggestions to improve the visibility of your package and blog article pages.

For now, you can contact me by sending a message to info at phpclasses.org. You can also join the just created PHP Classes Contributors and Fans group on Facebook so you can participate in the discussions about the upcoming features of the site, like the integration of the 4DUser tool.

If you have an Open Source project or some other site that you would like to optimize using this tool, I am interesting in gathering the feedback of beta testers, so I can guide you to use the tool and you use it by yourself. The tool will be commercial but for now there is no cost in testing of the prototype.

Just contact me by the email above or message me after adding me as a friend in Facebook. I will give you access to the tool and you will also be able to join a group of beta testers for the tool, on which you can get notices of the tool updates and watch more demo videos about it.

Conclusion

Data mining along with artificial intelligence are some of the most interesting areas of software development of the moment. They can be used as methods for implementing business intelligence solutions, even when your goals are not exactly tied to businesses in the sense of making more money, like for instance getting more visibility to an Open Source project.

The development of the 4DUser SEO tool will continue at an exciting pace even after it is officially released. More and more data mining solutions will be used to provide better solutions to give greater exposure to Open Source project sites and other types of sites. I will get back to this later.

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