You’re rushing to catch at flight at the airport.  You’re already late seeing as the cat threw up on your spiffy Armani suit as you prepared to walk out the door.  Late and stressing you glance at your watch; yes, you can make it!  You turn onto the last street before the airport… and grind to a halt.  There, standing in the middle of the road is a road worker with a Stop/Go sign in is hand – the road, YOUR road, is under construction!  Frustrating huh?

So are web pages that boldly proclaim “Under construction”.  What were the designers thinking?  There’s an SEO saying, “Content is king”.  More correctly, “GREAT content is king”.  Garbage content is a pauper and “Under construction” is the lowest of paupers.

Those who have read my blogs will see I’ve ranted about this topic before.  So why regurgitate it again?  I had the misfortune of visiting a site last week, that had not 1, not 2, not even 3 or 4 “Under construction” pages, but FIVE!  Why would I ever want to “check back soon…” as the content urged me?  On the rare occasions I have returned to a site with these pages I,

"So, how much traffic did you get from <insert source here>?"  "Ummm, not sure..."  

Well, how much traffic did you get to your site?"  "Ummm, not sure..."

"OK, how about sales?  Did your website produce any sales?" (You guessed it!)  "Ummm, not sure..."

Sound familiar?  Heard those questions before?  The crux of it is what you did based on those questions.  Did you just soldier on, put your head in the sand like an ostrich, or actually take a long hard look at your whole website and how you track campaigns?

Why sites don't perform

1. No one knows they're there!  Yes. I know that sounds simplistic, but, if you're on page 3 or worse you are, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

2. Bad navigation on site.  I see it all the time, even on professionally designed sites.  You can't find anything; important stuff hidden behind 2-3 mouse clicks.

3. Lots of flash.  Yep, Google supposedly can read content in flash, or is close to.  But do you want to alienate 10's of millions of Apple mobile users?

4. Poorly optimized graphics.  You can get browsers to re-size that 4Mb 3000px x 1800px image if you're too lazy

Obviously, the hopeful among us (and probably a bunch of the pessimists too!!) will answer, "YES!!".  One thing for sure, we'd all like it to be... in fact we'd all have preferred 2011 or 2010 to have been that year.

So are there really any economic indicators that are showing the economy is recovering?  There was a rise in IT salaries this year, though not huge, however the whole IT sector is pretty healthy, despite the fact that so many companies are abandoning the USA and sending jobs to India, Asia and Latin America.  Whilst this cheap labor seems a boon to the bottom line, consumers are likely to vote with their feet when an American alternative appears.  This is why we don't outsource.

Overall, most hiring managers appear to have a similar mindset to last year.  Approximately 1/4 (23%) of employers plan new hires for 2010, down 1% from 2011.  However,Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder, says that, historically, their surveys have shown that employers are more conservative in their predictions than actual hiring, so he expects 2012 to outperform hiring in 2011.

Gallup reports that Americans' economic confidence is at a seven-month high. The National Federation of Independent

Just over a year ago, we got our hands on 2 great pieces of software - Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Manager.  At that time we wrote quite a substantial review on what we found as initial reactions to this software. 

We have now been using AWR for just over a year and we are still as happy with the help it gives us as we were when we first reviewed this wonderful piece of SEO software.  AWR automates the incredibly important, but time consuming task of checking the rankings of the website we administer.  If we had to break it down to some bullet point of "Why we love AWR", it would go like this.

1. Time management.

AWR frees up valuable time to be able to move onto cash producing tasks such as marketing, client meetings and actual design work.  A huge part of any SEO program is actually knowing where a website sits or ranks among its competitors.  My Mom had a great saying on her Skype for years... "How do you know what you don't know, if you don't know what you don't know?"  And that's my point.  If you don't know where