Nvidia's "Optimized PC" campaign, announced today, is the market-oriented manifestation of its larger ambitions. The idea is that Nvidia wants to show you how to build or buy a PC that's "balanced." In Nvidia's opinion, that means that rather than spend all of your PC budget on a quad-core processor (and relying on a built-in graphics chip), for a truly modern PC experience you're better off spending less on the CPU and more on a dedicated graphics card. What this campaign really signifies is that a new fight over who gets to do your processing dollar has officially begun.
So says Nvidia.
(Credit: Nvidia)You can check out the official page for Nvidia's Optimized PC campaign here. You'll find a Flash presentation informing you that "Your PC is more visual than ever," as well as a generic configurator demonstrating the supposed benefits of a "balanced PC." There's also a page of links to various online retailers that lead you to lists of Nvidia graphics cards for purchase, as well as links to configurators from Gateway, Velocity Micro, Cyberpower, and Puget Systems, which lead to presumably "optimized" systems.
What's frustrating is that Nvidia offers little in the way of specific processor and graphics card pairings that might help you make an actual purchase. As for the vendor links, if you click through and start to build a system, Velocity Micro is the only one with a visual indicator that shows you the balance between graphics and CPU processing capability as you select different components. The allegedly balanced Cyberpower systems still allow you to match Intel's highest-end quad core processor with an integrated graphics chip.
If the Optimized PC site isn't all that useful, the point Nvidia is trying to make is clear. Rather than throw all of your money at a quad-core Intel chip, Nvidia wants you to spend less on the CPU and more on a graphics card. In turn, Nvidia promises that its 3D hardware will not only allow you to play games, but it will also enable you to watch and edit HD movies, edit and organize photos in flashy new interface designs, as well as turn on all of those visual effects in Windows Vista. You can do some of those things with quad-core CPU and an integrated graphics chip, of course, but you need a dedicated 3D card for the most robust visual experience. Therein, the battle for your processing dollar.
PicLens benefits from a 3D card, but have you heard of it?
(Credit: CNET)Whether Nvidia has a compelling argument depends on just how visual you like your computing. Do you turn the 3D cities on in Google Maps? Do you like Vista's translucent windows? Have you even heard of PicLens (which we actually like, but that's not the point)? PC Gamers already tend to favor Nvidia, but in order to appeal to mainstream PC buyers, Nvidia has to convince you that there's a nongaming need for the specialized visual processing capabilities of its hardware.
Arguing for the necessity of 3D hardware in day-to-day computing has traditionally been a tough position, largely due to a lack of compelling software. If Nvidia is going to continue with this marketing push, we need to see more than just a handful of applications that truly benefit from accelerated graphics. The question is, will that happen before Intel makes its next move? With graphics card plans of its own on the near-horizon, it's possible that Intel may be able to offer a balanced computing experience of its own.
It's interesting how aspects of our lives come into play. Prior to joining this Web revolution, or evolution, depending on your point of view, I worked in the world of consumer packaged goods. I developed and managed some of the office products that most of you probably use everyday. I became fairly familiar with even more products that I didn't manage, but was naturally exposed to. One of these was the Rolodex brand card file products after that parent company was acquired.
Even though I didn't manage the product line, there was always something intriguing about the products. In this highly electronic world we live in, business cards continue to change hands every day. At some point or another, I'd guess that nearly every TV sitcom has someone pulling a card or looking up contact information from a card file; or at the very least, one is seen prominently on someone's desk. It just lends credibility and is something we've grown to expect.
By no means do I see business cards disappearing anytime soon--so pull those boxes back out of the trash. But, keep in mind that even business cards can only take you so far. Beyond business cards, everyone (and every business) should make sure that they are adding LinkedIn.com to their marketing mix.
While there are a number of services that can help keep you up to date with your contacts--probably better actually--the mix of features as well as the huge and continued adoption of LinkedIn by professionals makes it a worthwhile Web marketing venue.
So how can LinkedIn fit into your SEO and Web marketing mix? Here are three key areas to focus on.
Links & Linking
Every LinkedIn profile is able to add three links to other sites. These could be anything--perhaps to your company home page or to your blog. What many may not realize is that these links are live, direct, and not "nofollowed" on the public profile page...which is the page that is openly available to search engine spiders.
Rather than using the default choices that LinkedIn provides when adding links though, select "Other:" to add relevant anchor text to your links. Of course, you also need to make sure that your public profile is set to actually show these links within the Web site section of your profile. Since these public pages are accessible to search engine spiders, they'll also pass PageRank and contribute to overall link popularity.
Now that you've added links, be sure to link to your public profile URL from other sites when appropriate. This way you'll drive a little traffic to the profile, and depending on the link, also flow a little PageRank through the profile page to your chosen Web site or sites.
Answers
SEO of course has a strong focus on-site and in regard to search engine spiders. But SEO is also part of the much bigger picture of search engine marketing (SEM). This becomes especially clear when looking at the social media arena. And no where is this more evident than in the LinkedIn Answers section.
The Answers section provides members a forum for asking as well as answering questions posed by other members. While search engine spiders may index and even return these pages, more importantly, these pages are seen everyday by real live human beings who may well be potential customers. Participating within the Answers section is an ideal opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership within your industry, draw additional attention to your Web site (since you did of course add a link to it from your profile as discussed above), network, and further build your brand image.
Optimization
Did I mention that your public profile may be seen, indexed and more importantly, returned within search results? What this means is that you have one more opportunity to rank, and not only rank, but rank via content that you control. LinkedIn is a great reminder that optimization is mostly focused on-site, but we should never lose sight of opportunities to optimize content we can control, residing on sites that may lead visitors to our site. And actually, LinkedIn may provide even more than one opportunity to rank since every employee's profile within a company may be one more potential search result.
Now this isn't a license to spam your LinkedIn profile. What it does mean is that it may be beneficial to give a little more attention to the summary information that you provide. Write it intelligently but also incorporating strong keyword-rich signals that are related to your brand, industry and Web site that you wish to be found for.
Best of all, even if LinkedIn decides to "nofollow" all links within profiles, or even block search engines from indexing member profiles, LinkedIn will still serve as an online marketing and networking channel to connect you and your business with potential clients and customers, which in the end, is what SEO is really all about.
But as I said earlier, don't go throwing out your business cards, or your card files. Who knows though, maybe in the future, business cards will look a little differently than they do today, and perhaps something more like this:
Brian R. Brown
http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianrbrown
Certainly allows for plenty of white space.
There's one thing all Windows users have in common: They all want the OS to run faster. Here are five ways to turn your tortoise PC into a hare.
Go the one-click route with the "best performance" option in the Visual Effects settings. In Windows XP, right-click My Computer, choose Properties > Advanced, click the Settings button under Performance, and then select the Visual Effects tab. In Vista, press the Windows key, type performance information, press Enter, and click Adjust Visual Effects in the left pane. In both OSes, you can choose Custom and deselect the options in the window below as you prefer, or simply select Adjust for best performance. When you're done, click OK twice.
Optimize Windows' performance by disabling unnecessary visual effects via this option in the Performance Options dialog.
Tell Internet Explorer not to save encrypted pages. Open Internet Explorer, click Tools > Internet Options > Advanced, scroll down the Settings window to the Security section, check "Do not save encrypted pages to disk," and click OK.
Set Internet Explorer not to save encrypted Web pages by choosing this option in its Settings dialog box under the Advanced tab.
Disconnect network drives you no longer use. Double-click My Computer (Computer in Vista, or simply press the Windows key, type "computer", and press Enter). Click Tools > Disconnect Network Drive, choose the drive you no longer use, and click OK. (If you use Vista and don't see the Tools menu in Computer, press Alt.)
Unload DLLs when the apps that use them close. When you close an application, Windows keeps the DLLs it uses open so that the program will reload faster should you choose to reopen it. You can keep these unneeded DLLs from cluttering things up by changing a Registry setting. Because making changes to the Registry can screw up your system, create a restore point first. With your Registry backup in place, press the Windows key (in Vista) or click Start > Run (in XP), type regedit, and press Enter. Navigate in the left pane to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\explorer, right-click in the right pane, and choose New > DWORD (32-bit) Value. Name the value AlwaysUnloadDLL, double-click it, give it a value of 1, click OK, and close the Registry Editor.
Disable Indexing Service. You may be happy with Windows' built-in search feature, but I prefer a third-party desktop-search utility, which I find to be faster and more accurate. If you rarely use Windows' own search tool, you can free up memory and processor cycles by disabling the resource-hogging Indexing Service that it relies on: Open Control Panel's Add or Remove Programs applet (Programs and Features in Vista). In XP, click Add/Remove Windows Components, and in Vista choose "Turn Windows features on or off" in the left pane. In both versions, uncheck Indexing Service, and click OK.
Speed up Windows XP and Vista by disabling the Indexing Service used by the OSes' built-in search feature.
Tomorrow: Sort messages in Gmail using instant folders.
As investors around the globe view the sputtering U.S. economy with fear and trembling, at least one maven of the market economy sees a reason for hope: Bill Gates.
At the Government Leaders Forum in Berlin, a student has a close encounter with Bill Gates and a tablet PC.
(Credit: Microsoft)Stopping in Berlin on his way to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he's expected to speak Thursday about the ways a more "creative capitalism" could benefit society's needier members, Microsoft's chairman told the German newspaper Bild that the best medicine to stave off a worldwide economic crisis is a good dose of new tech.
"I am an optimist. The U.S. economy could remain strong in the next few years because technological progress will urge it forward," Gates said. (Bild, of course, put his words into German.) He put current fears into the context of recent history--a U.S. economy that he said has been strong for the last 10 to 15 years. That statement glosses over the bursting of a certain dot-com bubble a few years back, mind you; no telling if that's Gates' omission, or an editorial one.
Of course, he's always been notoriously upbeat about the coming economic and societal benefits of technology. An op-ed piece by Gates in Thursday's Wall Street Journal reads like the stump speech he's given countless times over the last decade or more: "Together, hardware and software will be the catalyst for advances during the next 10 years that will far exceed the changes of the last 30 years."
But that's his role: As he told Bild, "I'm no stock expert--I'm a software person." Asked if he knows how much money he personally might have lost as markets have tumbled over the last few days, he again took the long view. "I look at Microsoft's stock performance every couple of weeks. The important thing is that in the past it's gone up more than it's gone down."
Gates was in Berlin for the Government Leaders Forum, at which he recommitted Microsoft to its Partners in Learning program, which provides software and training to educational efforts around the world.
No, I'm not talking about running laps or playing dodgeball...although a dodgeball challenge of white-hat vs. black-hat SEOers is certainly something to get the adrenaline pumping. The PE here is progressive enhancement, the better looking sibling of graceful degradation.
Progressive enhancement and graceful degradation are common topics in design and accessibility circles, but these are just as important to SEO as well. These techniques are often used along with advanced technologies like JavaScript, Ajax and Flash, but are even applicable to basics like application of CSS.
Let's start with some basics...using neither of these means that visitors or search engines may come to your Web site and see "garbage" or blank pages--not a good presentation and akin to slamming the door in someone's face.
Graceful degradation was a step to overcome this, where sites were designed for the latest browsers and technology, but were also made to degrade gracefully, hopefully delivering most of the content to the visitor, or at least informing the visitor that he or she may not be "getting" everything. This was meant to make for a nicer, friendlier Web experience. An overly simple example is the use of noscript tags for JavaScript functions to at least inform the visitor that JavaScript was necessary, rather than leaving the person clicking on something with no result, or whatever effect that apparently wasn't working.
Graceful degradation might be seen as being focused more on the developer than the end user. Progressive enhancement though is the opposite, developing for the lowest-common-denominator, and then progressively building on top of that. PE has delivery of content at the forefront, with presentation and the bells and whistles as added enhancements.
So why is PE so good for SEO? Well, simply put, search engines are rather limited in their abilities. Sure, they may have patents to their names, highly complex algorithms directing them, supported by multimillion-dollar data centers and the most advanced computing technology, all backed by Ph.D.s in various flavors and more engineers than us average folk could ever imagine, but their spiders are pretty much limited to following simple HTML links from page to page.
Without progressive enhancement, many sites add lots of great interactive functionality at the expense of cutting search engines off from the rich content on the pages. Maybe the best way to really understand this is through a live example.
REI progressive enhancement.
(Credit: REI)
REI tabbed content sections.
(Credit: REI)REI, one of Netconcepts clients, is probably familiar to most readers. With stores all across the country and an extensive Web presence, most of us can't help but think of REI whenever we are in need of new outdoor gear or clothing. Online retailers face some of the most challenging SEO issues. Major e-commerce sites often contain hundreds of thousands of product pages below layer upon layer of category pages. Unfortunately, more times than not, these product pages, the ideal pages for serving up highly targeted, keyword-rich content to search engines, are content lean, with little more than a few product bullet points.
Adding to the challenge, thanks to all the focus on adding rich user interfaces using JavaScript, Ajax or Flash, many e-commerce sites have hidden away what little bit of content they had on their product pages.
REI just launched a new design of their product pages. Along with adding even more content to better serve their visitors, they added a tabbed interface to keep the pages cleaner looking and limit the amount of scrolling that users will have to do. Best of all though, they did this through progressive enhancement so that users with older browsers or who for whatever reason may have turned off JavaScript, can still access nearly all of this great content. (The reviews are currently delivered through JavaScript.) And yes, search engine spiders are still able to access this content as well.
The image to the right shows how the page would appear with JavaScript off and the tabbed content revealed and nearly all of it accessible to search engine spiders. You can take a look at the product page for the Hobitat tent and see how much content is on the page in the tabs.
It's that time of year again when the kids head back to school and the air begins to hint at the coming of fall. I'm sure the first few days of school are spent doing a little refresh to get all the kids back up to speed after the summer months.
Of course SEOs don't get summer breaks and the learning doesn't ever really stop or even slow down. But that doesn't mean that a little SEO refresher every now and again isn't useful or is any less valuable.
Here are 10 important elements that should always remain top-of-mind with every SEO.
Unique titles: The page title is one of the most important aspects of your site for both search engines and users. Every page should have its own, unique title that encapsulates what that page is about in a succinct, keyword rich manner.
Crawler friendly: Many sites get off on the wrong foot to begin with, or fall astray along the way. All the keyword research and optimization in the world will be of little use if the site can't be crawled because of poor architecture or all your links require JavaScript. Likewise, Flash and Ajax are highly enticing tools (think: "eye candy"), but less than optimal implementation can stop search engines at your front door or leave them looking at what appears to them as empty pages.
Research & test: SEO is a constantly moving target. Web sites come and go, search phrases rise and fall in popularity, sites gain and lose inbound links, and search engine algos continue to change and adapt. Keyword research, site metrics and analytics should be viewed as ongoing tasks.
Keywords: Keywords are the foundation of any SEO program. With these in hand, you can begin to incorporate them into your page titles, headings and body text, as well as incorporating the most evergreen keywords into your file naming.
Compelling meta descriptions: Compelling keyword rich meta descriptions provide an opportunity to communicate with searchers, giving them a reason to click through to your site.
Don't compete: Each page of your site should have its own topical focus. Don't let your pages compete against one another, either because of duplicate content or trying to rank for the same keywords.
Build strong internal links: A lot of attention gets paid to link building, yet many sites fail closest to home with links within the site. Be sure that your internal links are optimal...no 404 errors from broken links, use good keyword rich anchor text instead of meaningless "click here" and "next" kind of links. Take this one step further and look where it makes sense to incorporate internal cross-linking to your own content.
Don't lose what you've built: A lot of energy goes into optimizing a site, improving search rankings, and building links. All of that effort can be wiped away in no time if you change filenames, move pages or even move everything to a new site or change your CMS without properly implementing 301 permanent redirects.
Participate: Today, succeeding online is about more than just keywords, search engines and rankings. You must think outside the site and participate in the greater community. On-site blogging, participating in other blogs and social media sites are all activities that serve to round out any SEO program.
Create great content: It should go without saying, but all your SEO efforts won't make a difference if you don't have great content on your site. Great content is what keeps visitors coming back to your site and encourages others to link to your site. Write content for your site users and the search engines will follow.
I know what your next question is: "Where can I find this tool to try it out on my site?" Well, that's the downside of this announcement. SiLC will remain a proprietary tool for Avenue A/Razorfish, so unless you are working directly with it as one of its clients, this tool is unavailable to you.
This decision is understandable though, since this is just another added benefit of going with them for Web design and optimization. That said, if they were to release this to the public, I think that it would be immensely popular. Who wouldn't want a 45 percent boost in visits from Google to their site? I know that Avenue A/Razorfish isn't in the business of providing their tools to the general public, but it would be really nice if they could work out a revenue model to make it happen.
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