There should be some great sales on computers this holiday season. Buying a computer may just have to be something that climbs to the top of your list. When considering the task, I would like you to consider that price should not be your foremost concern. Here is what I mean.

Getting the most bang for your buck can also be accomplished by buying only the features you need in a computer. Let’s look at some scenarios. It may help to make the point.

Hard Drive Space: If you run a lot of intense software programs, then buying a computer with lots of hard drive space would be important. Programs like Adobe Pagemaker, or Dreamweaver, AutoCAD would be examples of such programs. So look for sales where the hard drive is sufficient in size. This season, you should see some nice deals in the 500-750GB range.

RAM: This is an area where I almost always recommend that people get as much as they can afford. However, random access memory may not be as big a deal to people who use their computer for internet browsing and email. That is why companies like Dell, and HP, have come out with these mini computers! Most of those will come standard with 1GB of RAM. They also run on Windows XP. If you run lots of graphics, or like memory intensive video gaming, better go higher. 6-8GB of RAM would be good.

HD Monitors: why buy a system with a high definition monitor, if you did not need one? You can get a good 19 -21” monitor today for cheap. If , however, you are a movie hound, then you might want the better monitor. This would also apply for people who are buying a computer for 3D graphic work.

DVD’s If you don’t do a lot of with DVD’s on your computer, then you don’t need Blue Ray on your computer. This year, though, you will see a lot of deals for this, because manufacturers want you to switch to this new format. Just pay attention.

These are just some examples of what to look for when buying a computer this holiday season. If you save yourself some money, you can always add that into security software, and other software you have always wanted.

Hey,

I found another video from my friend Scott Willoughby that I wanted to share with everyone.  Hope you enjoy the video.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Getting Indented Listings from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

There are two times, at least, in the life of a website that you need to submit your website’s url to the major search engines.  When you fail to do so, you leave that task up to the search engine “crawlers,” that scour the Internet ( rather Wraith like), looking for new websites. The good news is there are lots of free website submission tools that you can use.

The first of these times is when you build a brand new website. You need to get word about your website out proactively.  It can takes weeks, otherwise, for the search engines to even begin to find your website.

The second time is when you make major changes to your website.  This could cause changes to your sitemap, and might even break links attached to your website, or links caught by search engines. A classic example of this is when users of Wordpress themes, like this site, change the default permalink for their website.  Search engine friendly url’s have to be built in the custom structure section.  Joomla sites started with content have the same issue. If these are not caught from the git-go, you will have a time where your search engine rankings will suffer.

Many so-called free url submission sites are anything but free.  They will require you to submit your url, email address, phone number.  After a period of time, the companies will want you to try out their services, and will want to “up sell” you to their new and improved submission subscription. In some senses, this is not bad. You may not want to do that work yourself. If you are really wanting to do the work yourself, you need to be careful with these “landing pages.”

Here are some free websites that are directly owned by the search engine companies:

• Google- http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
• Yahoo Search – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
• Open Directory – http://www.dmoz.org/
• Scrub the Web – http://www.scrubtheweb.com/cgi-bin/addurl.cgi
• Cuil – http://www.cuil.com/info/contact_us/feedback/?to=crawl%20me

All five of these sites are quality search engines. They have a Google PR rating of at least 6. They also have an Alexa traffic rank of at east 11707, up to the number one traffic site, Google.com.  With a little work, you can find others.

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J Gibbs recently emailed me with the question: “so how long does this SEO stuff take?” J is a client of mine. He was not upset, or being snarky. He genuinely wanted to have a feel for how progress was to be made.

Good search engine optimization takes an investment in time. Too often, our society has the expectation that we ought to be able to just do some “dark SEO magic,” click a button, and we done. Boom! That is just not the case. The game played with our search engines changes all the time. We are also competing against all the other businesses that want the same business.

If you are a small business, try investing 30 minutes a day in adding good content to your site, blogs, articles, videos, etc. Add links to your site. Make good use of social media. In time, it pays off. If you don’t want to invest the time yourself, find someone to help you.

In the healthcare It world, and I suspect other IT worlds, we have used a process for years to evalute how well our optimization efforts are working.

1. Set a clear goal for what you want to accomplish. You should know how many people have to visit your site to generate one sale. You should know how many people need to visit your site every day. Step one may be this easy. Step two may be to get analytics on your site, so you do know how many are coming.

2. Set a plan on where you want your business source. Good analytics can tell you how customers got to your website. If all your business is coming from Twitter, let’s say, and you are doing all your optimization on some obscure website that is not in your demographic, you are wasting time.

3. Decide who you want to target: Age, Sex, Income, all that. Do research on where your demographic is spending time online. Target some of those places for SEO. Do some testing to make sure you are getting return for your time investment.

4. Implement a plan based upon your testing.

5. Measure the results. Zero based thinking applies here. If something is not working, change it.

6. Adjust or optimize your plan.

So, you can continue to improve this process through the old 4 step plan: measure, report, analyze, optimize It will be worth the time you spend, if you put metics to your process.

Ray Province

Ray Province is an IT programmer in the healthcare industry and owner of Celtic Ozark Solutions, an IT company that specializes in website development, SEO, and social media marketing. You can reach Ray at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com or @celticozarkian on Twitter.

One of the biggest battles any new small website business faces is picking keywords that will help to ensure search engine success for the site. The internet is a proverbial “ocean” these days. Without help, you stand a better chance of getting hit by lightening than getting your website found.

One trick that can really help is finding a niche for your keywords. This is how I define niche keywords: they are a subset of a very popular, more generalized keyword phrase. For example, your favorite keyword might be “real estate investing.” Now log in to Google.com, and run a search for this keyword phrase. Good luck taking this one over in a day.

With time, you might be able to even take over these type of generalized keyword phrases, but it will take many days of consistent work. In addition, Google ads tend to dominate these type of searches. This makes fighting for the so-called “organic space” tough.

Niche keywords, though, can really make your website easy to find. A simple addition of something like “real estate investing Springfield Missouri” now makes the search look a whole lot different. My website can still key in on the REI component, while also capturing a section of the market in the area that I work. I have found a niche.

There is also a psychology to this type of niche marketing. There are lots of real estate investment “gurus” in the game. Yet, most people will want to do business, off the bat, with someone local. Niche keywords will give me a way to reach those people. In time, the website can take on a more natural evolution to the national or international level.

If you want to do this quickly, spend a million or so in ads. If that is out of your budget, give niche keywords for your chosen website business a try. It will bring you more search engine success.

Ray Province

Ray Province is a retired minister who currently works as an IT programmer in the healthcare industry. He is also the owner of Celtic Ozark Solutions, an IT company that specialized in website development, SEO, and social media marketing. You can reach him at celticozarksolutions@gmail.com , or @celticozarkian on Twitter.