Colin Jones

I've been learning a lot recently about optimizing sites for search engine rankings, which is clearly one of the most important business components of any website. If a customer can't find your store, how can they buy what you're selling? Think about your own experiences with Google or other search engines (there are others?!?)---would you look through more than 2-3 pages of search results if you found anything decent on the first page of results? I wouldn't, and you can bet the average customer wouldn't.

You can see for yourself what a difference search engine optimization can make by googling my name. You'll find it eventually, at #26, on my Plexus staff page. Before I worked here, I can remember going through the list pretty far past 10 pages (10 links each), and not seeing the real CoJo at all. At first, I thought that this increase in my internet fame was just due to the number of incoming links to the Plexus domain, but after a little digging in the source code, I had an epiphany: the word "colin" is littered throughout in URLs because we use Ruby on Rails, and "colin" is part of a route we�ve mapped to all the pages that have to do with me. So you end up with URLs like this:

• http://www.plexusweb.com/staff/colin/blog

This colin-ized route appears in tons of link tags in the markup, and search engines are finding each instance (and ranking accordingly). Yet another reason to let us build your site with Ruby on Rails.