Create unique Meta Titles. Try to make your website page titles unique to the content for THAT PAGE ONLY. Your most important keywords should be the first word in the title tag. In most cases, this is what will show up the most in search results.

Develop descriptive Meta Tags. This should be just one sentence or two describing your website page and its content. In Google, the page description is what shows in the search responses – so be sure to make it encourage “clickthroughs”.

Only use SEO-Friendly URL’s. Avoid using long URL’s where at all possible, and always try to use your keywords in URL’s. As your website grows, be sure to establish a naming convention for URL’s and adhere to it. Many popular platforms, such as Wordpress and Joomla, have plug-ins to assist you with this.

Write good Effective Content. In today’s very competitive SEO environment, CONTENT plays a huge role in the success of your SEO strategies. Consistently develop and deploy fresh, new content to your website to maximize your search results.

Optimize your Website Images. Write ALT text that exactly describes your images on their respective pages. ALT text is the words that pop-up in a bubble when you mouse over an image on a web page. Always keep the text very short, and never put the same keywords on every image on your website.

What did publishing in? Three things: Rising materials and postage and complex distribution channels increased expenses. The rise of search engine marketing (SEM)/pay-per-click and the advent of social media led to a steep decline in display ad revenue. And readers everywhere flocked to the free, immediate content available on the Web.

But help might be on the way from a most unlikely source: Apple. The same company that revolutionized the music distribution business is looks ready to do the same with the way we gather and interact with published information. There’s a good chance this revolution will begin before school lets out for the summer.

The heart of the revolution is the rumored iTablet or iSlate device that the Wall Street Journal announced will launch in January 2010 and ship by March. Although nobody has said anything official about the device, it has been mentioned by The New York Times in passing, and Sports Illustrated has actually posted an impressive demonstration of what their magazine *might* look like — on a device that has yet to be officially announced.

Why will the equivalent of a giant-sized iPhone be the salvation for the print industry? A few reasons:

• It’ll do for publishing’s distribution model what iTunes did for music. The old model of write/layout/print/deliver/consume will be replaced by write/layout/consume. Much faster and cheaper.
• It’ll bring back display advertising dollars. Today, print content is posted and reflowed to the Web, and a full-page display ad is replaced by a bunch of banner and tile ads. Not remotely the same user experience. By keeping print content in its native format as the iTablet allegedly will, the display ad again becomes a valuable piece of the marketer’s arsenal.
• It drops the barrier between offline and online content. If you looked at a magazine today and wanted to follow the call to action, you’d have to set aside the magazine or paper, open a browser, type in an arcane URL and hope you got it right. The iTablet experience removes the wall between print and online with the click of a mouse, engaging social media, online video, Flash animations, and more.
• It allows the user to keep content – and search it easily – forever. The beauty of the Web is that all content is linked together and searchable, making it unnecessary to hang onto old media. The same will now apply with content on the iTablet.

But Apple isn’t the only one looking to lead the revolution. Microsoft is preparing a device of its own called Courier, along with another impressive-yet-unofficial tech demo. Courier’s hinged cover actually mimics the act of holding a magazine better than a flat surface can. Whether the software is elegant and intuitive enough to meet the promises of the demo will probably mean the difference between a true revolutionary device and an evolution of the tablet PCs on the market today.

Most corporate communicators have already migrated their in-house magazines to either enewsletter or imagazine platforms in the last few years in an effort to save costs. But corporate marketers and communicators who haven’t built the iTablet or Courier into their plans for this year will be missing out on one of the biggest revolutions – and product launches – since the rise of the Internet. Bernstein Research is projecting that 3-5 million tablets will be sold in 2010 alone… will your communications plan be ready?

Every day, it seems that researchers and engineers take another big step forward in the ongoing pursuit of placing more and more capacity into our computers. For a technology-based marketing agency such as Sierra, these are exciting times for developing the right branding strategy for each customer by tapping into a rapidly expanding array of web-based tools. However, while the capacity of our hardware is growing by leaps and bounds, the hardware itself appears to be shrinking, or even disappearing

Not long ago, a single transistor (i.e., one of those little metal black bugs that fell out of dad’s radio that day you dropped it on the sidewalk) was large enough for you to easily hold between your fingers. Today, we have transistors that are literally one one-thousandth the width of a human hair. One of the biggest challenges now facing developers lies in finding ways to squeeze light through these gadgets. Can you believe it? We’re almost at the point where light won’t be able to “fit” into the transistors we’re building. It’s fascinating, but also hugely problematic.

Additionally, with the advent of virtualization, software and other data are no longer tied to any single piece of hardware. In fact, today’s virtualization solutions enable data managers to easily move ‘virtual machines’ (which might be running a company’s email system, or ERP solution, or high availability program, or whatever) from one server to another without ever interrupting the flow of information throughout the company. Better still, since virtualization enables the operator to run several solutions on a single piece of hardware, companies are actually reducing the physical “footprint” of their server farms by more than 75%.</p>

<p>At the same time, the convergence of cell phones, PDAs, cameras, GPS devices, social networking and so much more onto devices that become smaller every week means that the solutions driving our ongoing communications, social networking, web surfing, etc. are becoming less tangible and more virtual.

So, what do you think – Will communications in general, and marketing in particular, soon become a hardware-free enterprise where a webinar, a whitepaper, and a podcast can be delivered in the blink of an eye with no hardware component? If so, will that make our interactions more efficient and productive, or will we soon be “crushed” by a virtual mountain of “Tweets,” “tags,” instant messages, email, and good old-fashioned phone calls? Comments?