Search Engine Optimization is an important marketing strategy because it can deliver inexpensive targeted leads. It's a long term process where a company will attempt to create a site that is viewed by the search engines as the authoritative source for that term and will be displayed first.

Over time, a company active in SEO marketing will determine which phrases result in the highest conversion. For truly valuable phrases, it's often not enough to claim the top spot. Instead, the company will work to box out their competitors on the first page. In other words, the company will promote additional pages so that they will also be listed on the first page causing others to be pushed to page 2. Since search engines will only list 1-2 pages per domain per search, the company would need to have other domains that are relevant to that keyword phrase.  This doesn't have to always be their domain. They might have a listing in a directory, a page on another site such as Squidoo or Wikipedia, or an article on somebody else's site. 

For a while, people used sub-domains to box out their competitors, but there's talk that the search engines are going to start looking at sub-domains as folders, which limits it down to the 1-2 links per search.  Because of this, the only reliable method is to promote pages on several sites.

The more you own a keyword phrase, the better.  Repetition is a powerful selling tool. The more somebody sees references to a particular business related to what they're looking for, the more credible that company becomes in their mind.

Content Island ™

A Content Island is a term I've coined for the process of creating a set of pages that link to each other.  This can be a full website, but it doesn't have to be and usually isn't.  The fact is that it's far more beneficial to have higher ranking pages linking to your website than pages with few links back to them. 

To create those higher ranking pages, you'll need to have several pages linking to them, and that's where the concept of the Content Island comes into play.  Many websites allow you to link to your website from your profile page, and those same websites link back to your profile page in many places.  Take, for example, a blog site where you can comment on other's blogs. Typically, part of the comment will include a link to your profile or blog. The more you use their site, the more links are pointed back to your profile or blog, which will increase  your profile page's value.  This makes that one link from your profile on their website to your main website much more valuable.

In addition, you'll start to build credibility on that site assuming that your comments and other activities are legit and sincere.  This will result in more traffic to your pages on that site and ultimately more traffic to your real website.

ProSPOTLIGHT is a great site to create such a place because it gives you the ability to create a 5 page website, a blog, and a profile.  Each of these pages link to each other, which gives them intrinsic value for both your readers and the search engines.  When you comment on other's blogs, there are additional links that point back to your spotlight page, which further increases your spotlight's worth.

The Internet is a massive encyclopedia of knowledge that millions of people have contributed to. The web is made up of billions of pages that are all linked together.  Some of those pages are linked to by thousands of others, while some are linked to by very few.  This is nothing new since it's the fundamental concept of the world wide web.

The search engines have looked at the Internet as a whole and have tried to figure out what pages are the most important.  Google, in particular, decided that each link is like a vote.  The more links that point to a page, the more important that page must be.  In addition to this, they've decided that a vote's worth is determined by how many pages link to it and so on.  They also look at how closely both pages relate to each other.  The closer their subjects are, the more valuable that link is.  Google calls this concept PageRank.

As with any sort of ranking algorithm, there's an underlying problem.  The pages and sites that are deemed important are shown to more people, which in turn makes them more important since more people will view them and potentially link to them.  This makes it so the sites that are on top stay on top, while the rest are left in the dust.

There are as many strategies to get somebody on the top of the search pages as there are people trying to get there.  What it ultimately boils down to is that a web site needs to generate some buzz  to break into the upper crust of the existing monolithic websites. Once a buzz gets started, more people will link to them, which generates more buzz. Over time, they'll reach the top of their prized keywords.

So how do you generate buzz?

There are many methods, but the one that I like the best is a technique I've coined Content Islands.

I use Aptana Studio to program in Ruby on Rails.  Today, I upgraded Rails to 2.2.2 on my laptop and after I did that, Aptana complained that MySQL's driver had been removed.  The error happened after I loaded Mongrel inside Aptana and I tried to view the application's homepage.

This is the error that I'd get:

"!!! The bundled mysql.rb driver has been removed from Rails 2.2. Please install the mysql gem and try again: gem install mysql."

After reinstalling everything a few times, I found a forum post that put me on the right direction.

When I upgraded, it installed a newer version of the MySQL gem, which apparently doesn't work well with Aptana.  To fix, I put the old MySQL dll in my ruby\bin folder, and it worked like a champ.

The dll file is here:

http://instantrails.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk/InstantRails-win/InstantRails/mysql/bin/libmySQL.dll

I'm using the InstantRails package, and so my ruby folder is here: c:\rails\ruby\bin

I then restarted the MySQL server and Aptana and it worked perfectly.

This article assumes assuming that you're using the Rmagick gem. If not, just skip the Rmagick instructions. It also assumes that you're comfortable getting around in a Windows command prompt and installing and uninstalling standard Windows programs.

Upgrading Ruby on Rails is fairly easy, though there are a few steps involved.

First you'll need to download the latest Rmagick gem with ImageMagick. At the time of this writing, it is 2.7.1 for Ruby 1.8.6.

Unzip it to somewhere easy to get to at a command prompt then type the following commands:

gem uninstall rmagick
gem uninstall sqllite3-ruby
gem update --system
gem update
gem cleanup

Uninstall any existing version of ImageMagick that you have and then install the version of ImageMagick that came in your Rmagick gem zip.

Navigate to where you unzipped the Rmagick gem in the command prompt and type:
gem install --local rmagick

Next, make sure you have all the gems required by your application such as will_paginate by navigating to your application root, and running:
rake gems:install

Of course, the gems need to be defined in the config/environment.rb file. In my case, I have mislav-will_paginate defined like this:

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|
  #Get the Will_Paginate Plugin
  config.gem 'mislav-will_paginate',
    :version => '~> 2.3.6',
    :lib => 'will_paginate',
    :source => 'http://gems.github.com'
    #...
end

That should be it. I usually run 'rake log:clear' just to clear out those text files since they get pretty fat. For tips like these and other useful technical tips, visit Ask Some Geeks.