MonoDevelop 1.0 Released

I've been pretty slow in blogging about this but it's still worth pointing out that MonoDevelop 1.0 has officially been released. It's becoming a really feature rich and mature piece of software now and is definitely worth investigation if you do any development on a Linux platform.

Roll on 1.1 in six months time!

The death of Spirit?

In yet another example of mixed up priorities "NASA officials have directed the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) program to cut $4 million dollars from its approximately 20 million dollar budget this year" as reported here. The implications of this to program run on such a tight budget is that there will be staff cuts resulting in one of the rovers (Spirit) having to discontinue science operations and be put into hibernation mode.

Now I don't know about you, but this makes me incredibly angry. The fact that such a valuable program will be so dramatically reduced because of such a paltry sum makes no sense at all. These two rovers have taught us enormous amounts about our one of our nearest planetary neighbours, not to mention the lessons learned in the development and running of such advanced robotic explorers.

Now, I'm not an American so these aren't my tax dollars, but surely the average American can see that there are some real problems with the way their money is being spent. The Iraq war has cost $505.5 billion and change so far and what has it got the American people apart from 4000 dead soldiers and nearly 30,000 wounded?

I appreciate that maybe your average Joe in the street doesn't feel as strongly about space exploration as I do, but wouldn't you rather your money was spent on advancing human knowledge than killing other people?

Simple ASP.NET SEO Enhancement

As many people have mentioned one of the most important (and easy) SEO related enhancements you can make to your site is to use a unique title and meta description on each page.

In ASP.NET 2.0 the page title is easily set either via either the title attribute of the page directive in the markup, or by setting it directly in code e.g

this.Title = "my unique title";

Creating a unique meta description is slightly more involved but still pretty straight forward.

HtmlMeta metaDescription = new HtmlMeta();
metaDescription.Name = "description";
metaDescription.Content = "my unique description";
this.Header.Controls.Add(metaDescription);

These are two of the simplest and quickest SEO related enhancements you can make to your ASP.NET site - you've really got no excuse not to!

How good is your content?

The market I am planning to play in is geographically constrained. Because of this there aren't many competitors at this stage in the game which, initially you would think is a good thing. However this particular market can only support a small number of players, and because there are already established businesses operating and building brand recognition it will make my job as an SEO all that more difficult, but subsequently much more important.

I firmly believe that the defining factor will be the quality of the content provided. The value the customer perceives they are receiving by using one site vs another will ultimately dictate where their brand loyalty lies. Rand covers this quite well in this video.

Something web users are slowly coming to realise is that most markets are flooded with poor quality copies and once you find a site that produces quality content in the area you are interested in you stick with it.

SEO Newbie

I have a new super secret project I am working on and as a result I am learning a great deal of new skills. It is a web based project and to that end I have started reading up on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) with a view to applying these new skills in the near future.

The first thing that strikes you as a SEO newbie is where do I start? There seems to be a mountain of information out on the web, but as always sorting the wheat from the chaff is not easy. Also, a lot of the blogs assume quite a bit of domain knowledge. There don't seem to be too many people answering the really simple questions like "what exactly is a keyword?" and what does SERP stand for? (Search Engine Results Page by the way).

To that end I am going to start posting any little tid bits of information that I think might be useful to a real SEO newbie in the hope that I might help someone short cut the whole process somewhat. To start off with, here is a list of blogs that I've found to be really useful and contain well written and insightful content:

• seomoz
• seobook
• copyblogger
  
• scoreboard-media
• tropicalseo

Lots more to come on this topic, and hopefully I'll be able to provide some insight on SEO considerations specific to ASP.NET development soon.