Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is a critical component of doing business on the web. If your site or business isn’t among the first 100 to come up in a search, potential customers simply aren’t going to find you.

You can approach SEO by doing it yourself, or you can choose to work with a consultant, but either way there are a few fundamental rules that must be followed if you are going to be successful in boosting your search engine ranking.

Rule 1 – Keep Content Relevant

a minimum of 500 words of content on your website. 800 to 1000 is better. More content means more keywords and a better ratio of keyword density.

Search engines will often de-rank sites which overuse keywords, so if you have more content, you’ve got more room to include keywords. You can boost your content by adding a blog, a video page, or a news section.

Keep the content relevant, at least tangentially, to your business.

Rule 2 – Create Content for Search Engines and Humans

Don’t forget about your human visitors in your enthusiasm to optimize search results. Your content still needs to be interesting, readable, and informative, or you are going to lose all the potential customers you’ve just gained through using SEO.

Write for people first, and then revise as needed to ensure that you’ve satisfied your SEO goals as well.

Rule 3 – Work on Your Keyword Density

Keyword density should fall at 2 to 4 percent of your total word count. That is, for every 100 words, keywords will appear 2 to 4 times.

Keywords that are hidden in coding are often picked up by search engines, as well. Now you can see why a site with 500 words or fewer is much harder to optimize for search.

There are free online keyword density analyzers like the one shown below that can evaluate your site for you. If your current content’s density is too low or high, rework it to meet the target. Test you keywords now.

Rule 4 – Draw Them Into Your Posts and Website Copy

The use of keywords with H1, H2, and H3 tags draws the attention of search engine spiders, which crawl the web gathering content. A nice way to use them is in titles and subheadings, which also make content more readable for your visitors.

Most people won’t read a block of text unless something draws them in. It is likely that your pages will be scanned by your visitors, so giving them titles and headings which are relevant helps them to find what they’re looking for.

That keeps them on your site, hopefully looking more closely at what you have to offer.

These 4 rules should be kept in mind as you are building and updating your website. SEO should be in the forefront of your mind at all times.

Keep a list of keywords, and refer to keyword generators to add ones that you may not have thought of. Be alert to keywords in the materials of your competitors.

With just a bit of attention to SEO, you’ll organically gain more traffic and be able to grow your business.

Links, and in particular one-way links, have always been thought to be one of the top metrics that search engine web sites look for when ranking websites.

Although the spirit of linking to another website is to show a tacit recommendation for that website, there are many ways in which this metric can be exploited. One way is to simply buy links or pay a search engine optimisation company to buy links for you. The temptation of saving the time and effort of having to build relationships and court the opinions of webmasters is quite a strong one, yet many people swear off buying links for their websites, including many search engine optimisation experts.

The main reason is that the search engine algorithms can somehow tell the difference between paid links and organic links and will heavily penalize sites which have paid links pointing to them. However, many people still pay for links or allow the search engine optimisation companies that they hired to do the same thing. Why? Why do people go for the quick rise in metric rather than the long-term comprehensive social media and blogging strategy? And most importantly, is it worth it?

What you will find if you ask anyone who has used paid links for any significant amount of time is that the practice is not worth it. The major search engines, especially Google, make the punishment for paid linking much worse than any benefit that you would ever gain from it. The practice is known throughout expert circles to be packaged and easily found out, mostly because people tend to become lazy about where they placed their paid links, eventually placing them on irrelevant pages with low page ranks.

It should be noted that Google, or any of the other major search engines for that matter, are not strictly against paid links. It is the lack of quality that accompanies most paid links that the search engines have a problem with. Because the search engines have a responsibility to their “customers” above all, they do not want to see your paid links from your shoe website on a blog about politics just because that blog happened to be an extremely popular one.

This also tends to protect webmasters who do not have the time to police large websites, giving them a sort of quality protection over their customers. The overall quality increase is what the search engines are going for, and as they are the gatekeepers of your visibility on the web, they are the rulemakers.

All in all, paying someone to do paid links for is not worth the trouble even in the short term. The search engine algorithms are becoming more and more accurate at identifying paid links with every paid link that they find. The penalties for using paid links too often can include banishment from the major search engines, which does absolutely nothing for your business or your brand in the long term.

What search engine optimisation specialists recommend is a comprehensive search engine optimisation program which takes management of social media, twitter and blogs to actually reach out to and find your true audience. In the long term, this is a much more effective strategy for business that are trying to build a brand. Keeping yourself focused and your marketing strategy, intently focused on building and maintaining a brand with a target audience has long been known as a much more successful marketing technique than simply throwing spaghetti on to a wall and seeing what sticks to it.

The FBI is looking to develop a web application that can monitor social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, in order to gain better real-time intelligence about current or potential future security threats or situations.

This plan was inadvertently revealed by the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center (SOIC) in a market research request for a “Social Media Application.”

The eagle-eyed New Scientist picked up on the request, which aims to “determine the capabilities of the IT industry to provide a social media application.”

Government agencies like the FBI are usually reluctant to openly discuss how social networks are used as an intelligence tool.

In the Request for Information document, the FBI lays out the requirements for the application that it is seeking to build. In the background portion of the document, the SIOC writes:

The FBI has conducted market research and determined that a geospatial alert and analysis mapping application is the best known solution for attaining and disseminating real time open source intelligence and improving the FBI’s overall situational awareness.

We’ve embedded the six-page document below, but here are some of the highlights:

• Provide an automated search and scrape capability of both social networking sites and open source news sites for breaking events, crisis, and threats that meet the search parameters/keywords defined by FBI SIOC.
• Ability for user to create, define, and select parameters/key word requirements. Automated search of national news, local news, and social media networks. Examples include but are not limited to Fox News. CNN, MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
• Provide instant notifications of breaking events, incidents, and emerging threats that have been vetted and meet the deÔ¨Åned search parameters.
• Ability to immediately access geospatial maps with coding in addition to providing critical infrastructural layers. Preferred maps include but are not limited to Google Maps, Google 3D maps, ESRI, and Yahoo Maps.
• Ability to instantly search and monitor key words and strings in all “publicly available” tweets across the Twitter Site and any other “publicly available” social networking
  sites/forums (i.e. Facebook, MySpace, etc.).

The entire document is worth reading, if only to see the request for a “tweet lingo” dictionary within the app.

Monitoring social media activity isn’t limited to the FBI. Earlier this month, House subcommittee members urged the Department of Homeland Security to more closely monitor social media traffic.

While privacy advocates have bristled at the idea of social media monitoring, the government position is that if information is public, it’s fair game for scraping and monitoring.

The FBI’s RFI specifically targets “publicly available information” — rather than anything users keep private.

What do you think about how government agencies and law enforcement are using social media monitoring tools? Let us know in the comments.

Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?

As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most important principles for what he considered was good design. (Sometimes they are referred as the ‘Ten commandments’.)

Here they are.

1. Good design is innovative

The first principle is based on something that’s the basis of web design – innovation. A designer must always keep the fact that innovation can make all the difference in a good web design in mind. Here are two base aspects:

• Approach each project with an innovative mindset and critical thinking in terms of UI and graphic design, and always try to push your ideas forward, exploring new boundaries. Use creativity as an innovative tool to stand out.
• Always keep up to date with the new stuff around you, whether it’s a graphic creation tool or a new code language, using them for new ideas or to achieve new goals later down the line.

Managing innovation is a hard task that’s constantly evolving, but always keep an open mind to try new ways to create and give yourself some time to try them. Only like this can you have a better range of options to create good web design.

2. Good design makes a product useful

What is a useful website, and what does it take to make a website useful?

This one is a bit tricky, because the usefulness of a website can depend on many points of view, but I want to highlight three aspects of a useful website.

• Useful for the visitor: When you a have a website that makes it easy to find what the visitor is looking for and a careful UI and display of information, it can make a website useful.
• Useful content: Your content is the most useful part of a website, without great care with your content you can easily lose a key feature that makes you website useful.
• Useful for other machines: The last point in a useful website is how you code your site, because you always have to care for aspects such as SEO and performance in order to make it useful.

3. Good design is aesthetic

The aesthetic quality of a website is the balance between the visual details and the usefulness of it. Beautiful websites are those that deliver a unique experience when you visit them, and present relevant content.

From a purely design-orientated perspective there are three points that can help a designer achieve good aesthetic quality in web design:

• Colour: Work your colour schemes carefully – they add a sweet flavour to every webpage. Try different combinations and think about the meaning of certain colours. Be prepared to have different experiences on different devices, you won’t have as much control on the way a colour is displayed on a monitor as you have on a printer or an object.
• Grid / Space: When you’re composing the base structure of a website, you make decisions on how information is displayed to the visitor – keep it in some kind of order or grid and work the white space really carefully. The different sizes/symmetries/orders of information effect how the human eye interprets the content.
• Typography: The way you display the text and choose a typeface has more importance than many people think, to be able to read and highlight different content is based on the typography you choose for a website.

4. Good design makes a product easy to understand

To make a website easy to understand, you have to have a clear view of the goals that the website has in order to design for those goals. You must keep the ease of use and how easy it is for a visitor to reach their goal in mind.

For example, if you have a web shop, the goal is to sell, so make your design as clear as you can, carefully tailoring the experience of displaying the products and the way the visitor checks out. At its best, a website must be self-explanatory.

5. Good design is unobtrusive

The unobtrusiveness  of a website must rely on two main points:

• In the purely design-orientated point of view, Mies van der Rohe has this wonderful phrase: “less is more.” It’s really easy for a designer to get lost in decorative and graphic details, but don’t! Keep the content live – the visitor must reach the information as fast as possible, then work on the graphic detail from there, craft the experience of visiting a website without making people get lost in it. The design should be neutral.
• The other aspect is accessibility. You must keep the basic rules of web accessibility in mind when you design a website.

6. Good design is honest

What is a honest website? Honesty in a website is having an open approach to the visitor, always giving them all the options and not making your design more important than it really is.

Example: clarify the purpose of an option or button as much as possible, or use error messages to indicate what went wrong.

An honest website presents tools that helps visitors reach their goal, a range of options, visible links and other hints that give the visitor everything they might need.

7. Good design is long-lasting

A long-lasting website is always controversial, but this principle can be applied easily to the trendy side of design. In other words, there will always be a new trend in web design. Just don’t follow them without thinking carefully about the purpose of a radical change in your design.

A website must always be updated in its content, but the main structure should be long-lasting with small iterations in the design to improve the visual experience and technology to keep it fresh.

In web design ‘long-lasting’ has a different meaning than in real objects. The most important thing is to keep the visitors pleased with your design, and you must always be comfortable with your work. These two aspects can trigger a redesign, that, in our current age, will usually happen every two years.

8. Good design is thorough

This principle is self-explanatory. Leave nothing behind, craft every pixel of your design as though it was the most important, try to view your ideas from different points of view and carefully design the experience of visiting your website.

9. Good design is environmentally friendly

This is a hard one, and for this principle I will point to optimisation. When you design a website, you won’t reduce the carbon footprint by much or save the rain forest, but there are some points that you can keep in mind when producing a website that help it perform a little bit better, such as:

• Reducing the amount of bits that it takes to download the page
• Using images that are optimised for the web
• Optimising the code the best way you can in order to make it easier for your browser to use less energy to display your website correctly.

10. Good design is as little design as possible

And last but not least, the principle that can make the real difference in good design – always be aware of the goal of your ideas, create systems that are transparent and easy to use, concentrate on the essential features of a website when designing it and keep it simple and clean to be better understood by the user.

Let the content live and breathe on the screen, the best design is the one you experience and not the one you stand for.

One of the most important ideas to retain from these principles is that we design for humans. They are the ultimate goal of our website, we always have to keep this in mind when creating a new project. Like Rams said, “The designer is the user’s advocate within the company”, we have to create something rational, but at the same time emotional.

When you dig deeper into the work and legacy of Dieter Rams, you can’t help but feel inspired to go out and start creating amazing stuff, no matter what field of design you work in.

This is how I think this great set of principles created by one of the most important designers of the 20th century can be applied to a new design area, the digital era and to web design.

If you think differently, let me know in the comments.

Blogging: Everyone is talking about it, but few understand its real worth. Sure, it can be educational and entertaining, but it is also a valuable and even crucial element to a company’s marketing plan.

Blogs come in many shapes and sizes. There are personal blogs, food blogs, fitness blogs, sports blogs… the list goes on. For every hobby or interest, there are hundreds and possibly thousands of blogs on the subject. Writers of these blogs, or “bloggers” as they are more commonly known, range from professional writers to high schoolers. For an individual, a blog can be a display of photos and memories, but for a company, blogs can be a dominant source of traffic and search engine optimization (SEO).

The purpose of a company blog is two-fold. First, a blog enables you to provide useful information to clients, both current and potential. Blogs allow for brief, timely updates regarding new products, special offers, company news, and more. When you’re blogging pertinent and interesting information regarding your business and products, people begin reading. These readers will add to your Web traffic, which has the capability to boost sales.

The second and more important purpose of a blog is to add consistent, keyword-rich content to your site. Based on the keywords written into blog posts, ranking on search engines can be significantly boosted for important keyword searches. When it comes to search engines and how the ranking of websites are determined, content is king. If you are posting valuable content on a regular basis that includes specific keywords, this will increase your ranking on search engines for those keywords.

Consider the following statistics:

• Sites that have a blog that is regularly updated receive 55 percent more visitors than sites that do not.

• 97 percent more inbound links were found for sites that blogged than those that did not.

Blogging may be the most powerful social media device a company can employ; however, it is often the least utilized, since it can require a great deal of effort. Setting up a blog can be relatively inexpensive, but the upkeep of a blog is time-consuming. Adding new content regularly — something that is required if your blog is to add SEO value to your site — is impossible for a business with no time to spare. It is a challenge for busy companies to even think about keeping up with a blog, especially those who may not be comfortable with writing. In situations such as this, hiring a company blogger on a contract basis can be very beneficial.

Remember, company blogs should be a positive and helpful experience for their readers. The value a blog can add to your company’s marketing plan far outweighs the initial set-up costs and the efforts of upkeep. Analytics should be available through your website to help you determine from where your Web traffic is being directed, and where your readers are clicking when they leave your page. When properly employed, a company blog can add interest, SEO value, and traffic to the website of your business.