A lot of business owners tend to get the wrong idea about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and how it can help their websites. Years ago, when every web page in your site was built by hand, your web developer had a dramatic impact on the search engine performance of your website. But today, the complete opposite is generally true – Content Management Systems (CMS) tend to have fantastic optimization for search engines BUILT-IN. This puts more of the burdon and responsibility of search engine performance on the website owner/author, and less on people actually coding up your website.

More details after the jump

Can more be done beyond writing good content to help your site’s traffic? Aren’t there little secret tweaks that can be done to your site’s code to make it come up higher in Google and other search engines? Well, sure. But it doesn’t work like it did in the past.  Years ago, you could focus on a dozen or so key strategies to optimize a website for search engines. But those key elements (i.e. page titles, heading tags, link titling, sitemaps, etc) are now just considered best practices, and are generally built-into the CMS that your site runs on. So it then becomes a garbage-in = garbage-out type of thing in regards to your content’s quality, uniqueness, and frequency of updates. Choosing the right mix of keywords, using analytics, and managing content in a more proactive way are crucial to your website’s performance, yet most companies are too lazy to do this work.

There ARE other things that can be done to help SEO, but they are tedious, take a lot of work, and may still not make your website come up higher. Why? Because instead of a dozen main things that Google and other engines look at, they are now looking at HUNDREDS of aspects of your pages, including traffic, age, inbound links, page speed, and off-page SEO factors that a small business owner can’t easily change. What is the easiest way to hit all of those attributes at once? Write good content. There is a lot more to it, but it isn’t just keywords any more. We tell our customers all of the secrets to help with this.

But business owners don’t want to hear that there isn’t some magical SEO trick. In their mind, there MUST be a magic silver bullet that will make their website come up high in Google results. All they need to do is find the right developer to make that happen. This myth is the reason why there are countless search engine optimization, search engine marketing, campaign management, and other firms out there that will take your money, promise the world, and they won’t back their services up with guarantees of any kind. It is simple supply and demand. And from time to time, these firms call us to work on their client’s websites, and in 5 minutes we can tell that they don’t know much at all about SEO. They are simply selling hype. And people are buying it, so they churn through their dissatisfied customers with no end in sight.

Mark my words, as we move from the Information Age (relying on geeks) to the Participation Age (creating your own voice online with content), search engines will continue to show “live” results for websites that have a pulse. So your website beterr be “alive”. Also, just because you might get some traffic with a higher search engine result, that doesn’t MAKE PEOPLE BUY. You still need a well-designed website that has the necessary design features and applications that help people to use your website. It takes time, management of the site, analytics, and a strategy.

We are great at SEO. It is built into all of our applications. But instead of looking for a keyword strategy that might get you a few more hits, we would rather help you to design an online marketing plant that will get you more SALES. Sales beats HITS any day of the week.

My old PC laptop served me well, but….

I loved my Acer Ferarri laptop when I got it two years ago. Fast, good looking, lots of features like a card reader. It has served me well. When I got the Ferarri, it had Windows XP preloaded on it. I immediately wiped it and installed XP fresh. Ran great for quite while. But a few months ago, I decided that it was time to wipe XP and reload it again, because it was starting to slow down (as windows does over time). This time, I decided to give Vista a shot, since it works OK on some of our other systems here at the office.

More after the jump.

Vista destroys my Ferarri laptop’s performance

Vista went onto the Ferarri without a lot of problems, but I noticed something peculiar: my fan was running constantly, and the laptop got hot – REAL hot. Apparently, the AMD processor was forced to work a lot harder than usual, and instead of my fan coming on only during heavy multi-tasking, it was staying on all the time. The Ferarri got so hot, that it was too hot to put on my lap without a pillow or something. It is pretty funny now, but one time I even smelled something burning – it was the smell of the pillow getting hot (not good). I can laugh about it now, but it was annoying as hell. My battery life dropped substantially, due to the fan and the processor working harder. I ended up getting only 40 minutes of life out of it, and my bootup times were incredibly long.

Time for a new laptop

As I started to shop for a new laptop, I hadn’t intended to get a Mac, but I was aware that they had new laptops coming out. I also heard about the new thin and light line of laptops at Best Buy. I went and checked em out, and bought this Toshiba:

Bought this Toshiba from Best Buy, and took it back

It is a nice 13.3″ thin and light laptop, with a 2.4ghz processor in it and 2GB of ram. I got it home, and was pretty excited about it until the mouse button broke – not good. Took it back to exchange it, and they were out of them. Also wasn’t happy with the 1280 x 800 resolution (ick).

Got a new MacBook, then took it back for a MacBook Pro

What they DID have, was the new Macbooks, with DDR3 RAM (twice as fast as regular ram), and a lot of new features. I can run 99% of my software on the Mac already (Adobe, MS Office, Firefox, Adium IM, etc), so I didn’t have a worry about running Windows apps. I bought the regular Macbook, and brought it home. Once I got it home, I wanted some of the features on the Macbook Pro (express slot to use for a card reader), and the bigger screen (1440 x 900).

My New 15″ MacBook Pro

I had to drive to Concord Pike (202) to the Best Buy up there to get the 15″ Macbook Pro, and I love it. It is super-fast, and I my USB celluar card screams on it. I am going to put 4GB of DDR3 ram into it next week. I haven’t turned on the Ferarri laptop for two days now.

Initial Thoughts

• super-bright LED screen
• backlit keyboard is nice
• nice fast bootup
• two video cards
• great speakers
• Entourage (Outlook for the Mac) works great with my Exchange hosting
• Cellular card browsing is much faster
• Adium is way better than Trillian (for instant messaging)
• Bluetooth mouse works up to 50 feet!
• Nice and thin

So far, so good. I like it.