The main strategy of your web site if you are focused on optimizing it for certain keywords in search engines should be focused on content building and link building. In and of themselves both of those strategies are beneficial for your site and your customers, but they provide an added benefit of making your site more search friendly. I have identified several tips as Content Building or Link Building tips. I will add to this list as I find new opportunities for either.

• Content Building: Add a blog to your site. Blogger is a free tool for creating a blog and it has the capability to publish your blog to your web site with FTP. If you are a client of Plexus, you can also purchase pxBlogger and have a blog built into your site.
• Link Building: Get your blog added to Technorati
• Link Building: Buying words at The Big Word Project. $1 per letter. Make sure to buy words that you are trying to get ranked on. While this site is new and has no google Pagerank yet, it has promise considering the viral aspect of it, and that it is being linked to from many sites.
• Link Building: Check out Andy Hagans list of Social Media sites to consider when trying to build organic links.

Sometimes you hate the things that make your life so easy, because you have some problems with those things that make it temporarily more difficult. But then you fix the problems, and everything's back to being cool again.

In this case, I'm using Engines with Ruby on Rails, and there seems to be a conflict between my version of rake and my version of engines. So I did a rake db:migrate and got the ugly-looking:

undefined method `last' for {}:Hash

on line 10 of the rakefile. Well, after some Googling and clicking through, I found that all I needed to do was update a few lines of the engines code. In /vendor/plugins/engines/tasks/engines.rake, change the redefine_task method to read as follows:

def redefine_task(task_class, args, &block)
   task_name, deps = (RAKEVERSION >= '0.8.0') ? resolve_args([args]) : resolve_args(args)
   task_name = task_class.scope_name(@scope, task_name)
   deps = [deps] unless deps.respond_to?(:to_ary)
   deps = deps.collect {|d| d.to_s }
   task = @tasks[task_name.to_s] = task_class.new(task_name, self)
   task.application = self
   if RAKEVERSION >= '0.8.0'
     task.add_description(@last_description)
     @last_description = nil
   else
     task.add_comment(@last_comment)
     @last_comment = nil
   end
   task.enhance(deps, &block)
   task
end

Tagging is quick and easy way to annotate and categorize content. Tags are used in many different ways on many different web sites now. Examples include Flickr, Amazon.com, Blogger, etc.

Let me give you a good example of how powerful tags can be. Lets say you are trying to find photos of Athens, GA. Where do you even start? You could go to Google and type in "Photos of Athens Georgia" and you will get back 699,000 results. Each of those results may have a photo or two of Athens, Georgia but you would have to spend an enormous amount of time to find anything useful. Or you could go to Flickr.com - a photo sharing site - and use their search by tag feature. Thousands of Athenians and tourists have posted photos of Athens Georgia and each of those people took the time to tag their photos with "Athens Georgia". In one action, and on one web site you can see every photo that was "tagged" with Athens Georgia.

Because tags are so prevalent, and usually have very good relevance in relation to content, search engines see them very favorably. When applied to the concept of search engine optimization, tags become an invaluable tool.

Because of the way a tag works, when you create a tag, a new page is created. So each unique tag you make becomes a new page. If you made 1 blog post and tagged it with 10 individual unique keywords or keyword phrases you essentially created 1 page for the blog post itself, and 1 page for each of the unique keywords. In a very short amount of time you have amassed 11 pages for your site!

Because ONE of the factors in how well your site is ranked compared to other sites in relation to a particular keyword is the volume of content in your site, the faster you can create relevant content, the more competitive you can be.

If you have worked with us on building your site you have the capability to add any of our tools which have the tagging capability to your site. Here is a few of those tools.

• pxBlogger
• pxGallery
• pxNews
• pxFaq
• pxVideo

If you do not have a site built by us, and would like to talk to us about building your site please contact us at (706) 353-2048 or through our contact form

This is not a joke my friends, but my work has finally been honored in the latest issue of TIME Magazine. As many of you may know, Time is one of the largest publications in the nation and is in news stands all over the country. This kind of recognition might cause me to be inundated with job offers from every designer coast to coast. Sorry Plexus, But I'm makin' it big time now.

If you don't believe my claims, you can see for yourself here. In TIME Magazine's February 11th, 2008 issue, page 35, top-left section of the page, there is a poster visible in the photo. That poster is my winning poster for Focus the Nation that TIME found compelled to include in their latest issue. Sure, it looks like the focus is on the student, but it's pretty obvious that the real focus is my poster (no pun intended).

Now that I've made it in the world of design, Stephanie, I think it's time for that raise.

I saw a news story online recently that said watchmakers are scrambling because so many people use their mobile phones as their primary timepiece. I'll admit, I'm far less likely to wear a watch these days with the knowledge that my phone will pick up the slack.

So phones are taking over territory from watches. At the same time I think we are recovering territory from our phones, in the form of available memory.

In 1995, how many phone numbers did you have memorized? I'll bet that number has been cut in half, if not more by now. I've come so far as to get my list of memorized numbers down to a handful. At present I know exactly four phone numbers off the top of my head: my cell phone, the landline to my parents' house in North Carolina, the number of my cousin's house when we were kids, and 911. I can also remember a couple of prior iterations of my own cell phone number, but those are no longer valid, so I'm not counting them. Every other number I "have" is stored on a microchip.

What now lives in my memory in place of all those phone numbers? Hopefully something useful, like good memories, not more numbers.