We are using the gauges image as a metaphor for thinking in classes and objects, which, in the software world, are the building blocks of abstract thinking.  We are doing that because it is easier to demonstrate an abstraction when it applies to something that you can see, rather than something that is invisible.  Notice the commonalities of the gauges objects: they all are processes which convey information from the automobile to the driver.  Although they differ in their detail, they all possess the property of being able to convert the voltage into usable information.  They all have scales, labels, pointers and the necessary equipment or functions to convey their respective information to the driver.

In a smaller sense they do have meaningful differences.  Their scales are different; their labels differ; and  their sizes differ.  And depending on the model of car, their shapes and colors can be different.  However these smaller differences can either be built in to the classes that define the gauge, or passed in as parameters.

It is the commonalities of these structures it would make our gauges and excellent example of a candidate for an abstract object.  Software designers refer to code that is a blueprint for these objects as ‘classes’.  Objects can also possess powers known as functions or methods which enable an object to perform its expected tasks.  In the case of the gauge object these methods are limited to those that receive and transmit information.  The gauge objects all receive information in the form all of voltage from a wire connected to them.  And they confirm that information and output it to move their needle pointer to an appropriate level all in the gauge’s scale.

Notice that in the case of the speedometer and tachometer, there are additional digital gauges which are used to convey the information of mileage.  However even in these embedded digital gauges, information is derived from the same voltage current sources.  It is also significant to note that these embedded gauges demonstrate another important principle of abstraction: that classes can be and frequently are composed from other classes, and can inherit and/or override properties from their more primitive ancestors.

It is this object oriented approach which is the hallmark of modern database and software design.  The practice of discerning, building and re-using practical and useful software objects creates synergies and efficiencies for both the software design process and the client, bring value to both.  It is also the best way to evaluate and test the integrity of the output, and maintain or modify the resultant code.

The ability and skill with which a software designer/consultant is able to visualize and perceive abstract components in the systems which the software designer is modeling is the most important and direct indicator of the web development consultant’s value and integrity in the quality of his work.

There are several distinct types of mashups – consumer and enterprise. Enterprise mashups usually occur over secure networks, and are processed on a server, while consumer mashups are more forgiving, and accomplished on the users’ desktops. Web-based mashups usually use the clients web-browser to do the combining and reformatting of data. The various data streams must be sent to the client device as individual data streams so that they can be processed. Server-based mashups will do the analysis and reformatting of the data on the server side and send the data to the client as a single data stream.

Early mashups were created manually by programmers. As with many programming break-throughs, they were first done by enthusiastic programmers just to see if it could be done. As mashups became more popular, there arose a market for tools to simplify and speed up the creation of mashups. Software companies responded by creating tools that allow designers to construct mashups in a visual environment. All the potential components of a mashup are presented in this visual environment and can be connected to create the desired mashup. While mashup editors have made the process of creating mashups much simpler, they have not done a lot to create new ways of accessing the data to be combined. Mashup Enablers address this problem by adding new types of data that can be added to a mashup. A mashup enabler is defined as “the service and tool providers that make mashups possible”.

This type of technology was impossible until recently because of the speed of the average consumer internet communication. The number of http requests needed to ‘feed’ one page of data necessitates a high speed connection to the internet. And the very nature of the requests makes pre-made dataset presentations unfeasible. Associated technologies such as XML, SOAP, JSON and evolutions in Javascript capabilities have also facilitated adoption of slick representations of this and other Web2.0 applications.

Here’s a mashup created using Yahoo pipes. Yahoo pipes is a graphic interface which allows querying, filtering, sorting manipulating and formatting output from sources across the internet. This particular one taps several RSS feeds using technology from Yahoo and Delicious. The combines them into a single feed which is sorted by dates so that the most recent articles appear at the head of the list. If left to its own devices, the pipe would return hundreds of thousands of articles! But for our purposes, we limited it to the 15 most current articles.
(add references to other Paladin articles above)

However, with the advent of readily available high speed processing on the desktop and high speed communications, this mashup technology is beginning now to come into its own. Web pages that before were static and ‘dusty’ and were outmoded before they were published are now beginning to give way to dynamic conversations between the provider and user. Mashups are one way of delivering custom tailored content to a hungry consumer with an ever shortening attention span and an ever expanding demand for information.

For the business owner, it is also a boon. Here is an excellent way to provide up to the minute content which can be tailored to the needs and desires of an interested customer – kind of like an MIRV missile (multiple independently-targeted re-entry vehicle). This is very powerful magic from a marketing and business development point of view. And even more exciting is that after the relatively small initial setup cost, the business owner can have his website updated and fresh, targeted to any individual customer or prospect by piggybacking on the technology of someone else!

Here’s a mashup using Flickr.com and Flickriver.com. Flickr is the repository of data containing the photographs, and Flickriver provides the technology that produces a randomly ordered list of up to 500 separate images from a pool of Flickr files. The list is different every day, so this blog article will show a different crop of images every day -automatically!

No, this is not plagiarism. It is perfectly legal and respectable. The providing companies expose their API (application programming interface) to the public exactly for that reason: they are anxious for other sites to share their technology because it establishes themselves as an industry standard, and makes it more likely that they will get a larger share of the business generated by the downstream customers .

If you feel that your company might benefit from such an enhancement to your web site and marketing program, please feel free to contact us. Additionally, we welcome comments on our articles in the space provided below.

A few months ago, I answered a question posed, i think, on one of the LinkedIn discussion groups (as MrPaladin) where someone wanted to know about Web2.0. My answer was roundly accepted as authoritative and descriptive. But in retrospect, it was probably provincial and pedantic. The answer I gave described the feature of Web2.0 applications that allows interaction with the user without reloading the page. I used as examples perhaps web pages with stock tickers, or news tickers which constantly update their content, or folks who put their latest tweets from Twitter on their web page to be updated the minute each gem of wisdom gets published.

That answer was correct, but one dimensional, because it focused only on the appearances and apparent technology. In a practical sense, Web2.0 is a much larger concept.

At Paladin Consultants, LLC we do web sites, and web services. Many of the technologies we use come from more sophisticated and mission critical applications. Over the past decade, developments in computer languages, processing speed, band width and transmission speed has grown, with an associated increment in demand and expectations for more sophisticated content, marketing, interaction, and entertainment in web sites. This article is an exposition of some of those methods and techniques.

Another article, which discusses the technology of XML (eXtentible Markup Language) was published a few weeks ago in our blog.    XML is another indispensable tool for creating and maintaining content in web2.0 pages.

The early web sites were billboards. They advertised their clients’ product for all who passed by. This progressed rapidly to shopping carts, so that the passers by could order and pay for products. But there were obvious limitations. In the first place, folks don’t like to read long web pages. So the amount of information offered on a page needed to be limited, or, even better, refined so that the user got served only what he was interested in.

Second, marketing grew more sophisticated. Instead of just offering products to a mass market, web sites not are able to establish a kind of a dialog, or relationship with the customer. This is accomplished through interaction over the web. You don’t want to force the customer to reload pages with every choice, so new technology now allows the user’s machine to go and request new data, choices, colors, or what have you while the customer is browsing elsewhere on the page. That new information is requested, received, and formatted behind the scenes, and inserted into the appropriate place while the customer reads on without interruption.

This Twitter widget is something I have resisted putting on our blog and web site. Not all the things I mention on Twitter are, strictly speaking, technology and business related. But in the overall context of things, perhaps that’s not all bad. People sometimes value that the folks they are dealing with are real people and have personalities just like them. And this Twitter widget is a good example of how you can be more in touch and interact with your customer. It puts a ‘human face’ on your company brand.

Web2.0 is said to be the embodiment of more exciting, interesting and topical content into today’s web by using new technology such as javascript, video, sound, and content from other sites. Interaction and content from Flickr, Twitter, Google, YouTube. The ability to embed this new technology into web sites and deliver them to users through their browser brings a welcome new dimension to web communication with the customer.

Story of my life from Paladin Consultants LLC on Vimeo.

Here’s a very short video a friend recently sent me. It suits me to a tee philosophically, and it is illustrative of the purpose and intent of this article in a very real way. See if you don’t agree that content of this sort will make a user more receptive. See if you don’t agree that it can go a long towards establishing a connection between the site’s owner and the prospective client/customer/user.

Here’s a demonstration of a web2.0 technique that combines the solution of economy of screen real estate with a clever way of ascertaining and then delivering content tailored to a user’s preferences.  Click on one of the dark subject words below.

Web2.0 is a great technology because it delivers on target to so many points:

Interest
By your choice of ‘Interest’ you have shown that this subject is a key hot button for you. You don’t need to be bothered by the other items, and clicking on the key word can be both recorded and rewarded. At the same time, screen real estate is conserved. Sometimes when a user is confronted with a huge page of text with no ‘candy’ he will move on before you get your point across.

Content
You are able to add interesting and rich content to your articles or pages in a way that didn’t exist until very recently. Sometimes you might want to add a video extolling the virtues and benefits of your products, or convey an idea in an entertaining way.

Marketing & SalesHere, as I suggested above, you are able to ferret out the user’s preferences, and deliver a targeted response. You are fmeeting his/her needs in a way that was impossible before. You are able to establish esily a relationship with the user which is non-threatening and helpful. And this technology will help you distinguish yourself from your competitors.

ROITechnology, properly implemented, is an effective and cost saving technique. You are able to use a veritable smorgasbord of other sites’ technology (such as in my Twitter example) including Google, Flickr, Yahoo, and many many others. Many sites encourage use of their content, and even provide maps, or hooks into them because they want to cooperate and establish a standard. This is good because you can use this free content to offer information and service to your clients. A prominent example of this is Google Maps, which are appearing on many retail sites today. And, although the technology is not ‘so simple a caveman can do it’, it is well proven, reliable, and effective.

The purpose of this article is to suggest various ways that one can improve his content and delivery to targeted and happy potential customers. The fast moving technologies embedded in web2.0 web pages is growing more powerful and pervasive every day. If I were to talk about all of the technology, the article would too long and uninteresting. So I have confined my remarks to suggesting business uses of this technology. If you would like to see more examples shown in a non-technical and non-threatening environment, the folks at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan have put together an excellent primer on the subject. Another, more technical source is the W3Schools Online Web Tutorials.

Please feel free to comment on this article below.

I read an article about 10 days ago which was critical of Microsoft’s efforts to gain a toehold on the web that got me to thinking.  The premise of the article was that Microsoft has thrown huge sums of money into developing a web presence, but has so far failed.  Kevin Kelleher, the article’s author advances an argument that Microsoft should throw in the towel, and get out of the web business, because Microsoft obviously doesn’t do ‘it’ well.

My own vantage is one of an early and ardent admirer of Microsoft.  My Company, Paladin Consultants, LLC ,was one of the original Solution Providers (later renamed Microsoft Partners Network).  Over the past 20 years, we have  designed hundreds of custom software projects for many big name clients using Microsoft Sql Server database, Visual Basic,  .Net Projects in C#, and extensive application development using the Microsoft Office Products (including programmed routines in Word, Excel, and full blown small database system in Microsoft Access).  A few of the larger projects are detailed on our website.

Gates & Co. has changed the world through their innovations, and they are deserving of every nickle they have made.  Microsoft’s software products set a standard for quality, ease of use, and innovation that the rest of the industry used as a standard.  And for years we have been a strong supporter of Microsoft products.

But something happened in the mid ‘90’s - a number of things, actually, that changed the character of Microsoft, and of the playing field.

First, Microsoft seems to have lost its spirit of innovation.  Their execllent ideas like Windows, Visual Basic, SQL Server, and Office have only been marginally improved since the mid ‘90’s.  Their PR machine would, perhaps vehemently disagree with that assertion, but, aside from the cosmetics, and being easier to connect with those programs, the functionality has been little changed for the good of the user.  Their foray into the browser market is a case in point.  They built Internet Explorer into their Windows software to preclude competition from other browser manufacturers like Netscape.  They were sued by the U.S. Justice department  and by the E.U for anti competitive practices.  The corporate culture for some reason elected to compete in the market with anti-competitive practices, rather than innovation.  The Netscape browser was, unfortunately a casualty.

Second, the terrain of the battle shifted dramatically.  Although Bill Gates paid lip service to the concept that ‘ the future of the information business is the internet’, in practice his actions showed that he didn’t get it.  For instance, take a look at this snippet of text taken from a word document:

In an effort to make IE and Word indispensible, Microsoft allowed Word users to save their documents as HTML files.  The only problem was that in order for those files to render properly, the user was required to use IE.   Here’s a snippet of the HTML generated by Word.  Notice how the tags are largely proprietary, and not able to be interpreted by other browsers:

The larger thought is that the very gestalt of Internet is to have as open a system as possible.  The internet is home to many different operating systems, and APIs.  The nature of the beast is that all participants must be able to share those resources freely.  Microsoft’s view of the world, however, is that they want everybody to use their products, and will do anything they can to ‘tie’ as many people as possible to their paradigm.  In a real sense, thse two competing philosophies and business models are incompatible.  Another example of this is the Microsoft .Net platform.  We develop on .Net for clients, but invariably, there are open products that are available that do just as good a job, if not better, faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain.  The same can be said when comparing Windows Internet servers with Apache Linux servers.

So, when it comes to Internet products developed by Microsoft, by the time the product comes to market, there are already superior products available from their competitors.  VBScript vs Javascript, MSN vs Yahoo, Bing Vs Google, IE vs Firefox, Frontpage vs Dreamweaver and the list goes on.

Third, Microsoft has an extremely poor record of loyalty to its ‘partners’.  They have shown this again and again that when it becomes advantageous for MS to desert their partners, they will do so in a heartbeat.  The loyal army of Solution Providers were presented with a more and more expensive and onerous set of hoops to jump through that it became not a good business proposition for most of them.  In the beginning, Microsoft was a good source of referrals for many of us.  It was advantageous for them to establish themselves as the default platform.  But after a few years, those referrals invariably went to the ‘partners’ who sold the most Microsoft desktop products.  So, like their own internal innovation, relations with their ‘partners’ also fell prey to the drive to stoke consistent quarterly earnings growth.  Their relationship with RealPlayer is another example of this kind of ‘partner’ dissolution.  RealNetworks ended up suing Microsoft and winning $3/4 billion, in addition to the $600 million fine levied against Microsoft by the E.U. related to the RealNetworks suit.

I am concerned that as the desktop market matures along with the growth of Internet and cloud computing that Microsoft will continue to suffer reversals.  Of course, it is possible that the company will experience a resurgence in its innovation, but at this point it is difficult to see the theater that will make this likely.  Contrast this to the buzz that frequently comes from the new product machine at Apple. Growth in Internet based computing shows no signs whatever of slowing down.

In 1949, Charles Goren published his seminal work, ‘Point Count Bidding’, in which he described a method of evaluating Bridge hands for playing and bidding.  Goren’s ‘Point Count Method’ revolutionized Bridge playing for the rest of the century, and was the basis for an entire contextual grammar that the best teams used to describe their hands to each other.  Elegant in its simplicity and powerful in its approach, the method evaluated cards by assigning ‘points’ to the highest cards, and additional points to short suits in a hand.  Players would then translate those point counts into the native language of the game so partners could in a concise and precise manner, describe their hands to each other and arrive at the best fit in the bidding.  The system made Goren the most successful and best known professional Bridge player of all time.

Bill James

Bill James had an early interest in baseball.  After graduating from the University of Kansas in 1973 with degrees in English and Economics, he set about publishing an annual book called The Bill James Baseball Abstract.  The annual was published from 1977 until 1988, when he stopped to write more pointed books and articles on baseball, as well as new annuals about baseball.

Both of these guys are notable for bringing numerical analysis to bear on importantly refining the knowledge of their business.  In Goren’s case, he collaborated with several others – another bridge player, and an actuary –  and built a system based on empirical observation and experience.  James used computers and statistical analysis to accumulate, evaluate and formulate his ideas.  He was not immediately accepted by the baseball cognoscenti.  While he was doing his work, he was working as a security guard at the Stokely Van Camp, and, after all, what could a security guard possibly know about baseball?

But his work gained acceptance because his conclusions were statistically verifiable.  See, Bill had data processing capabilities that allowed him to go back in time, and pose questions, and challenge assumptions that had long been held in the industry.  He was able to quantify, for instance he defined the concept of secondary average:

where

• TB =Total Bases
• H =Hits
• BB =Walks
• SB =Stolen Bases
• CS =Caught Stealing
• AB =At Bats

This measures a hitters total contribution by including his walks and net stolen bases.  Another concept he pioneered was the Runs created measure of performance, which, he suggests, is a better measure than the normally used RBI:

where H is hits, BB is walks, TB is total bases and AB is at-bats.  In both of these indicators, Bill reevaluated the contribution of walks in baseball offense.  This was significant in that a player who got relatively fewer hits, but drew a lot of walks were valued by the baseball market at a lower price than their contribution.  James demonstrated that these hitless wonders who drew walks were almost as valuable as the ones who hit a lot of singles, but could be had for far less salary.

He had a number of such axioms which applied to pitchers, formulae for equating minor league performance to major league expectations, and many others.

He was hired by the Redsox in 2004.  Many think he was a decisive factor in the Redsox winning the World Series in 2004 and 2008.  The previous Redsox victory in the World Series was 85 years earlier.  He advised the management on what mix of pitchers to hire, was a main proponent in hiring David Ortiz.  He’s concerned about such things as where players normally hit balls, who can take advantage of Fenway’s close-but-tall Green Monster Wall in left field, which pitcher/catcher team allows fewest steals.

Now those numbers were available to anyone for the past 100 years.  But until the computer age, they were available in an unusable form.  And it took Bill James to shuffle and deal those numbers and experiment with them to bring about a more meaningful and productive way of using them to benefit the industry, and various teams in it.  He had not an impressive resume, nor exceptional intelligence.  But he was a man with a passion for baseball with the statistical and computer skills he needed to apply to his favorite sport.

Many businesses have analogous situations to baseball before Bill James.  They have the data, but perhaps it is not in usable form.  Raw accounting reports are not very useful because by reporting on P/L and taxes accrued they are like the won/lost major league standings records: they report on what has already happened.

A proper managerial accounting system should allow you to collect data by product.  Which products are you selling and to whom? When to they sell best?  How do they respond to different advertising media and themes? How do sales of each item respond to news items? What industries buy your products?  Does your system allow you to get and process feedback from existing customers?  Can you segment and analyze your different products/markets?  Can you easily share pertinent information among different departments in your company?  Can your prospective customers find you on the internet?

If your business is typical, there are literally hundreds of questions and answers you should be mining from the data and computer records you already likely have!  And if you are not recording this information in a usable form, the gain from making a change will be paid many times over in a smaller or more productive workforce, better information, better sales responsiveness, happier customers, better product feedback, more effective advertising and marketing, and on and on and on.

How about interacting with your customers?  Can they order online?  Can they get return authorizations? Can they make suggestions for improving the product?If you have a large company, can you effectively communicate with your employees?  (Not by sending an email to a few, but broadcast changes in policy?)  Changes in individual retirement, or other benefit plans?

We have a long history of doing similar projects with a wide variety of companies.  Solutions typically involve a capable database management system, user friendly software tailored to the demands of the individual business, and a consultant who can listen and quickly understand the demands of your particular business.  Adoption of techniques such as these in your business plan allow your business to compete more effectively, even though your competitors are larger in size and capitalization.

Facebook and Twitter were innovative at the time, and helped businesses form a relationship with clients with a more personal approach, allowing a subtle transition from a purely passive approach to their prospective clients to a more pro-active and personal one.  A lot of folks missed the point of Twitter and Twitter and came late to the party.  The same can be said for the late adopters of Facebook, who didn’t understand their kids’ fascination with the social aspects of Facebook.  College kids live on facebook.  Andif you had any doubt about the centrality of Facebook to the zeitgheist of our society, one need look no further than Michaele and Tarek Salahi’s crashing the Whitehouse state dinner late last month.  Pictures of them and Obama and them and Biden were on their Facebook page before dawn.

I wish I had a nickle for everyone who commented on my embracing the Twitter idiom with a snide comment like, ‘What do I care what people had for breakfast.’  A lot of folks are missing the point of both of these social sites:  they provide a way to form quasi social relationships, and so called weak friendships.  Their point is that people are more apt to do business with people with whom they have some sort of connection.  If you’re looking for someone to re-do your kitchen, you’re much more likely to choose someone from your church, or even someone who is friendly with the butcher whom you lilke.  I am not a big Facebook user because it is too time intensive, but I have met quite a few friends, professional colleagues, and business partners on Twitter.

But Twitter is still a quasi passive platform, though the lines are blurry.  I do know that the easiest way to turn someone off on Twitter is to come onto him with a hard sell:  ‘I’ve made $15,000 this month on Twitter, and I can show you how to do it, too!!!!!’

But thee are now on the horizon two very important developments which promise to significantly enhance the power of using Twitter.

But first a small diversion.  Earlier this year, an enterprising your Australian named Chris Duell developed a site called Twitterhawk.  Now the idea of Twitterhawk is that the site sifts through the Twitterstream looking for key words that you set that occur near a geographic location that you specify.  So if you were a carpenter in Peoria, you might set up a search that looks for kitchen remodeling in Peoria.  Twitterhawk would return to you a list of those tweets,  And, for a few cents a tweet, Twitterhawk would send a series of rotating tweets to those whose tweets you designated as appropriate targets.

Back to those new Twitter innovations.  The first was the implemenjtation of lists on Twitter.  Now you can create lists of folks on Twitter that you follow.  And you can categorize them with common traits, for example software architects (like Paladin Consultants, LLC ), or economists, or photographers.  It helps you keep track of people, especially when you have lots of followers.  You can see the Twitterstreams of these lists, and even get an RSS feed of them.  Better still, in most cases everyone has access to virtually all of everybody else’s lists!

And where can you find and mine these lists?  Listorius is one of the first resources dedicated to managing the new feature.  Mashable also has a growing arsenal of Twitter Lists.  Unless I miss my guess, new sites dedicated to this new tool will be popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain!

The second innovation comes from a site called Listimonkey, a site designed by a very clever young Belgian expatriate named Xavier Damman, now living in the Bay Area.  He has also managed to secure a domain name in his own name!  Anyway, his wrinkle on Twitter is that if you send Listimonkey the name of a twitter list, a key word or phrase, and your email, Listimonkey will email you with a set periodicity the tweets from members of that list contain your key word or phrase!  Now, although there is some SEO juice and pride in having a large list, this is not necessary to work with Listimonkey.  In fact, you can use anybody’s public list!  (Most lists are public.)

Now think about that.  If you are a real estate agent in Chicago, you might watch somebody’s Chicago list for the key word ‘moving’.  If you were a photographer in Atlanta, you’d watch somebody’s Atlanta list for the keyword ‘wedding’ or ‘getting married’.  And, Listimonkey allows you to create as many of these list/keyword combinations as you like!  Very powerful, and a dimensional abstract improvment on Twitterhawk’s idea!

But Listimonkey is good not only for finding new customers and clients.  It’s great for finding out about new products, techniques, people, trends- wealth of information from one site that harnesses the communal information it mines from the Twitterstream!

I’m afraid Xavier’s innovation will spell bad news for Chris Duell and Twitterhawk.  It’s a shame, but the market marches on.  One can only wish Chris Duell luck, and hope that he has another great idea.  But with talent like he’s shown, I am sure that his next idea is right around the corner.

But getting back to Listimonkey, as those emails come rolling in from Listimonkey, it would be pretty easy for a good software developer to come up with a program which would parse those emails as they came in, and then tweet appropriate messages to the originators of those tweets mentioning the keyword(s).  Xavier has such a good idea, that I predict will soon overrun his mailserver.  But that will be an happy problem for him to solve!

Please leave a comment, so we know whether or not we are on target!  It helps us find out what our readers think.

Now, understand that there are literally billions of web pages out there, and choosing the right ones to deliver is not a trivial task.  Let’s say you have a business that sells household appliances.   Well, there are thousands of other business that are in the same line of work.  How do you get your page to the top of the list?  Don’t forget that if your page is 240th on Google’s list, it will appear on page 10 of the results.  It’s not too likely that many people will have the patience to wade through 10 pages of results and find your offerings.

One poor strategy might involve optimizing your page for another popular trending topic of the moment – say Britny Spears, or Jonas Brothers, or Barack Omaba.  That might bring a lot of traffic to your page over the near term, but not traffic that would result in folks buying an appliance from you.  Mostly, those people would visit your site expecting to get information on one of the trending topics listed above – and would be disappointed!  The search engines would also quickly find out about your rouse, and would ban you for your deception.  Don’t forget – it makes them look bad, too.

So now you can see that if you optimize your page for ‘appliances’, you will lose because Amazon,, Sears, Walmart, and hundreds of other more well-known and better capitalized businesses are ahead of you in the line.  If you optimize for one of the popular trending topics of the day, you will disappoint the user, and the search engines, and, most likely, be banished into the black hole of unindexed sites. What’s a body to do?

Well one strategy is to employ the ‘long tail strategy‘.  A hypothetical user is searching for an electric bar swizzle stick.  Consider the number of people in a month who search for ‘appliances’ – could be in the hundreds of thousands – huge competition for you; household appliances in the tens of thousands – less competition, but still unworkable; ‘household bar appliances’, perhaps in the hundreds – much better!  Similarly, if you were a dentist who wished to maintain a viable presence on the internet, simply optimizing your page for ‘dentist’ would put you in competition with  tens of thousands of other dentists.  However, if you were a endodontist in Rye, NY, or Westchester County, you would have a much better chance at being clicked on by a guy with a root canal issue in Rye, NY.

So the right strategy is to give up the very small opportunity to be seen by a rare one of the hundreds of thousands of folks who are looking anywhere for any kind of appliance or dentist for the much larger chance of being selected by a user looking for a specific product or service in an certain area – even though that population will be much smaller than the generic search.  Now there are a number of variations on this particular technique.  They vary with the size and budget of your organization, the number of goods and services you offer, and the type of business you’re in.  But this long tail technique, generically speaking, is one of the most effective search engine optimization tools available.  Please visit our website, or watch this blog for further articles on SEO (search engine optimization) and web development.