Brice Cheddarn Development

While looking through some recent tweets in Tweet Deck, I noticed that Keith Olbermann mentioned that he would be on the Colbert Report television show soon.  He tweeted the announcement along with a link ColbertNation.com.  Since Colbert Nation was a site that I had never visited before, I thought I would check it out.  

As always with a new site, my hopes were that it would be a ColdFusion website (I'm not a self-labeled ColdFusion Nerd for nothing).  While the Colbert site itself wasn't a CF site, I did notice a link on the home page that contained .cfm.  So, like any good nerd on a mission, I clicked the link.

That link took me to the New York Philharmonic website.  It didn't take long to realize that the whole site was well-constructed with ColdFusion, and is actually pretty awesome.  It is chalked full of CF functionality, in addition to well done Flash animation.  

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May Fourth...the day Star Wars fan's around the world celebrate the greatest holiday of the year.  This day is considered an unofficial holiday by Star Wars fanatics as a way to honor and celebrate the entire culture and franchise that has developed over the years.   

The Star Wars saga is one of the most popular and celebrated science fiction franchises of all time.  The origin of this specific date is unclear, since the actual release of the original Star Wars movie came on May 25th, 1977.  It's been suggested that May 4th was selected because "May the Force be with you" is a famous quote spoken in the Star Wars films.  So, fans commonly say "May the fourth be with you" as a part of the celebration. 

ColdFusion's Jedi Master is definitely enjoying the holiday.

Being the nerd I am, it made sense to start my day off with seeing what Star Wars-related domains were available for acquisition.  Were there still any available Star Wars domain names worth registering or owning?  The quick answer was YES.

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In a quest to educate myself in as many areas of search engine optimization as possible, the term Digital Asset Optimization kept popping up.

The process of Digital Asset Optimization (DAO) isn’t exactly new, which means it isn't exactly the new form of search engine optimization.  DAO is the holistic approach to SEO.  It's a complete process of optimizing online content to make sure digital media is properly indexed.

As Gabriella Sannino at Level-343 adequately puts it, Digital Asset Optimization is really just "full-blown SEO with a fancy acronym."  But hey, what computer nerd doesn't like acronyms?

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During the past few years, web enthusiasts have seen the rise in popularity of infographics.  

Infographics are representations of information, data or knowledge blended together with unique design to create awareness.  They are an artistic rendering of facts gathered from a poll or survey and conveyed by graphic elements, including charts, graphs and a wide variety of other methods. 

They illustrate information that normally hides in text form, and channel that info in a visually pleasing, instantly understandable manner, making it not only powerful but visually stimulating.  Infographics are universally understandable and provide content for people to easily share and link back to.

The infographic acts as a way to visually spread awareness through social networking sites, and will hardly need any pushing to get tweeted about or linked to if it is fun, interactive and not confusing.

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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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Mobile web usage is growing at near the speed of light these days.   That leads many professionals in the search optimization industry to believe that 2011 will be the Year of Mobile SEO.

Yes, mobile search engine optimization is a different world all of its own, similar to other forms of search like organic, local and instant.  Mobile is treated like a different beast when compared to more standard SEO practices and content creation. 

With that in mind, here are a few optimization-related factors to consider when constructing mobile websites:

Page Weight: Page load time on a mobile device is vital to the success of a site for obvious reasons.  Search Engine Journal says that a mobile page should have at least half the load time of the normal version.  A page's latency is likely even more important for mobile search rankings than on a normal website, so it requires a bit simpler, cleaner and more direct design and construction approach.  With mobile sites, bad UI design could indirectly effect search rankings. 

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In order for a website to organically grow the number of other websites linking back to its content, they have to make a planned and concerted effort.  Producing relevant content is a great start, but individual website owners and small businesses need to develop an ongoing strategy to acquire links back to that content from other websites.  

In the world of SEO, this is known as Link Building.

The link building process involves structured activities to include quality links from other relevant sites with a good authority and context. The process might be more accurately labeled link acquisition.

When constructing a link building strategy, there are a few things for important things to keep in mind. First, building links is as much about having something to link to as much as it is about acquiring the link. Second, the quality of the website linking back to the site is extremely important.

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One of the many Mango Blog plugin ideas we've jotted down in recent weeks deals with a new web analytics service called Tynt that allows website owners a way to leverage the power of copy and paste.

Tynt is a service that adds an automatic attribution link to content and images on a site.  When someone copies and pastes text from your web site, Tynt automatically adds a link back to the original article in the Paste. Not only does it help website owners track content and image shares that previously happened without their knowledge, but the link backs also help to drive more traffic back to the site.

One of the most important criteria search engines use to determine how relevant a website is the number and quality of links back to the site.  Tynt automatically generates a link back, which helps to optimize a website without having to be an expert in SEO. 

Tynt enables users to measure engagement by tracking when a visitor copies text or copies an image from the site.  

Many people assume that the most popular way to share content is via Social Media networks like Twitter, Facebook or any of the other sharing tools.  According to Tynt, email is still the easiest and most common way to share content. For every user who clicks a “share this” button, 50 users are sharing by copy and paste.

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