1. Polish the user interface.
2. Improved file upload function.
3. Incorporate TinyMCE into the project.

The other main project I have in mind is to actually create a website for my North Georgia Web Design company.  This is good case of the cobbler’s kids going with no shoes.  I just need to commit the time and do it.  Another idea I have been tossing around is creating an online database of common mistakes developers make.  I know I can contribute a ton.  For example, I as telling a friend last night I forgot again to set the margin and padding style for a <ul> to 0 when I was attempting to create a nav bar with an unordered list.  I sat there for several minutes trying to figure out why i had space above the <ul> in Firefox.  Duh. 

As I’ve mentioned in the past, web design and web development sort of fell in my lap.  Living in the North Georgia mountains, I never really thought much about web design or development.  I’ve gone over this in another blog, so I won’t beat it to death, but to cut to the chase, I have found my perfect job.  It never dawned on me that I could take skills that I had developed as a hobby and use them professionally. 

So every day is a new chance to try to use those skills, and a new chance to talk to another business or individual about how internet marketing or a web site can help them.  So, it is a dream job for me.  I’m doing something I really love doing - North Georgia web design , and you can’t beat that!

So fast forward to a few years ago.  When my wife got into real estate, static real estate sites were the norm.  In other words, you created a web page for everything you wanted to talk about on your site.  There was no centralized way to do this, you just made a new page if you got a new listing.  Not only was this time consuming, but we often found that the pages were not optimized for search engines - more specifically Google, which is what I want to elaborate on first.

When we first advertised our real estate web site online, the only way to get any exposure at all was via Google PPC or Yahoo PPC (pay per click).  My new job became learning about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing).  To this day, it is an ongoing learning experience.  That being said, the learning experience has proven very useful to us.  Where we used to spend well over $24,000 a year on PPC (pay per click) advertising, we now spend around $150 per month.

Optimizing our site and working on a  strictly non-black hat  approach has worked very well for us.  Black hat essentially applies to people that are looking for a shortcut to have their site rank better in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).  My experience has been sort of interesting regarding this.

When we first created our real estate site, I tried and did everything I could to promote it and to make it rank better on Google.  I kept looking for shortcuts, links farms, tons of directory submissions, etc.  I would move ahead one notch in the SERPS, then about a week later, I would get knocked down a couple pegs.  The whole time I kept reading Google’s Webmaster blog and related sites, and the message was pretty much the same:  create unique and compelling content, and the traffic and the search engines will generally follow.

So that’s exatly what we have done…and we’ve gone from being on page….100? of Google for key terms to page 1..to often number one for many keywords.  This holds true for many other search keywords as well that are the odd keyword phrases that people tend to type into a search engine that are related to your site, but may now use the exact phrase for which you have optimized.  These terms are often referred to as long tail keywords.

The long tail keywords are what I describe as creating a large footprint on the Internet. All those strange permutations and variations or phrases that have to do with your business BUT are not phrases you would ever think to optimize for are accounted for - most often in the context of a blog. At least, that has been our experience.

It still amazes me when I look at the amount of QUALITY traffic we get from long tail key words.  Many SEO experts believe that the leads and contacts derived from long tail searches are often more qualified.  It’s hard for me to say for sure, but I do believe there is some truth there.  For example, we often receive very strong leads from lifstyle type blogs about the community we live in, but we may receive only a few sort of half interested leads on a blog about a new listing.

It’s defintely food for thought, and if we can help you, please contact North Gerogia Web Development at (706) 579-0411 or email us at info@georgiamountainweb.com.

Therein is my gripe.  When I got into web development, people kept telling me to get Dreamweaver.  So, I’ve used Dreamweaver now for several years now, and I’ve used it on several different version of Windows - XP, XP Pro, 98 (I think early on), and Vista.  By far, Vista performance has been the worst.  I could deal with the sluggishness, but the FTP performance is awful, and I just can’t handle it any more. Dreamweaver has it’s strong points, but it is expensive  (even to update), and that craptacular FTP performance is for the birds.

So onto other products - I think!  Here are a couple I am looking at:

• PhpED - seems relatively inexpensive and it has some good buzz about it on the web.
• Zend Studio for Eclipse - From people that know PHP inside out.  However the latest iteration of the IDE has not gotten such fabulous reviews.

I’ll report back after a few days with the trial downloads of each.

~Dan Elliott
North Georgia Web Development Blog

So what’s the deal with the North Georgia Web Development website?  Here’s the story.  Several years ago, when my wife was first getting into the real estate business, we had a local company create a website for us.  The site looked nice, but it was poorly optimized.  It was also difficult to update.  Anytime I needed to make a change or add some content to the site, I had to contact our web hosting company and pay them to do it for me!  So I had two problems to solve:

1. How could I get my website under the noses of prospective clients and customers without shelling out money for Google PPC ads? (At the time we were spending 20K-30K a year on Google ads.)
2. How could I create a site that was easy to manage and update?

The second question was the easiest to solve.  My background in computer programming allowed for an easy transition into web development.   I created my first CMS (Content Management System) to handle our real estate site in Big Canoe.  What was once a chore to update (or worse if I had to call the web dev team to do it for me) became a breeze.  Dynamic web sites are the way to go if you have any sort of data that changes or needs to be updated.

The first question was quite a bit tougher to answer.  As I mentioned above, our real estate company was spending a pretty healthy sum every year using Google’s Pay Per Click ad campaigns.  My daytime job became figuring out how to achieve great placement on the search engine results pages (SERPs) to help decrease the costs of our pay per click ads.

In general there are two parts to SEO (Search Engine Optimization):

1. Passive SEO - This involves setting up your web site from the beginning.  As my father always said, if you do the small things right, the big things are a lot easier to accomplish.   For example, every page on your site should have a unique title and description.   Keywords in the meta data should be used sparingly as should the words in the title and the description.  Also, using a domain name that describes your business is helpful.  The goal is to provide a good user experience and to keep it concise.
2. Active SEO - Also known as off page SEO, this is an ongoing process so whatever I list may very well change 6 months from now.  Regardless, here are a few examples of off page SEO:  submission to select directories, active link building campaigns, good blogging techniques, and social networking.

Providing solutions to the technical problems I have encountered in the real estate business has been both challenging and rewarding.  Hopefully this blog  will provide a place for my thoughts on the ongoing evolution of SEM and SEO, and I hope that any readers will share their thougths as well.