Brice Cheddarn Development

Unless you've been visiting the planet Tralfamadore for an extended vacation, you've likely heard the buzzword HTML5 thrown around a time or two.  Now that the advertising and marketing hipsters have picked up on the trend, HTML5 is the code version of Justin Bieber.

HTML5 is the next evolution of the Hyper Text Markup Language that brings majority of the Internet to life in a browser.  It represents an improvement to the way the web performs, making it easier for designers and developers to create awesome websites. 

HTML5 also seeks to make the web more efficient for users regardless of the browser or platform.  To do that, it introduces several new elements and attributes that reflect today's web needs.  With it's highly touted media playback and offline storage features, HTML5 allows sites to directly embed media with just a few simple HTML tags, something that Apple hopes might help phase out Flash and Silverlight.  In addition, it adds new interactivity features like drag-and-drop, something familiar to anyone with a Gmail account.

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In my vision quest to find awesome websites that are constructed using the world's greatest programming language, it quickly became evident that ColdFusion is extremely popular on college campuses across the United States.  This fact might come as a shock to some web professionals, especially those who continue to persist that ColdFusion should be retired to a nursing home somewhere on the web.  

While this post proved to be fairly simple to research, is also turned out to be a major time consumer.  As the data began to pile up, the more I kept digging to see just how far the .CFM rabbit hole extended.  

By using a simple search method (.cfm site:arizona.edu), and swapping out the school domain for various institutions around the country, I was able to determine just how exhaustive the list would be.  The list I created is nowhere near complete, as that would have taken a few weeks to construct.  Despite being incomplete, it still contains some very interesting data. 

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As in any web industry this day and age, the trends in search engine optimization are hard for SEO professionals to keep up with.  For the web developers, small business owners and casual bloggers, that is especially true.

Thankfully, a few of the most important elements involved in optimizing a website or mobile site aren't likely to change anytime soon.  They aren't even things you need a degree in Physics to understand. 

No matter how much search engines change their algorithms, one thing will always be true:  writing quality content is arguably the best way to improve search rankings for keywords.  In other words, when all of the SEO mumbo jumbo becomes confusing or time consuming, just focus on writing quality, relevant content.  

No matter who is writing the content, or what the content is about, here are a few simple tips that will help to naturally optimize a site thru quality content.

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Google Analytics has long been considered one of the most powerful "free" tools for tracking inbound and outbound website traffic.  It logs a plethora of information about the traffic trends on a site that is helpful to small businesses in maintaining a healthy SEO strategy on a budget.

The service captures the simple basics like visits, page views, bounce rates, popular content and popular sources.  It also collects more complex statistics like which keyword phrasesused to find a site, referring sites, traffic sources, time on page, visitor browser stats and average time on site.

Those statistics allow companies to prepare more accurate marketing strategies, construct more-targeted PPC ads and track advertising ROI.  The data gives business owners accurate details on what their customers are most interested in terms of product/content, where people are located, what pages on the site are not performing well, etc.

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According to the Exploring IE Blog, Microsoft's newest version of Internet Explorer 9 was downloaded over 2 million times since its release earlier this week.  The new browser is alleged to have greatly improved support for standards like HTML5 and CSS3, a new ligher design, improved speed and several other new features like privacy controls and "pinning" websites to the taskbar.

Popular website GigaOM notes that users shouldn't be so quick to hop on the IE9 bandwagon.  The install requires a restart, still isn't 100% standards compliant, and has a long way to go in catching up to HTML5 capabilities. 

With the launch of Internet Explorer 9, curiousity peaked about what the new global trends were before heading into the latest round of the Browser Wars.

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