Last weekend a couple of us alligatortek personnel had the chance to attend the Social Dev Camp Chicago 2010 conference, or SDCChi. If you don’t know what SDCChi is, it’s a conference for developers and business people to get together for a couple of days in order to discuss trends and possibilities in social networking technologies. It truly is a great forum.

Due to my line of work, I usually know about rising trends and new services before they reach general public. I was on facebook before it was even available for use by the general public, I was on MySpace before it was cool (only to rapidly become tragically uncool), and I was on twitter before it became the holy grail for celebrity stalkers. The draw-back of getting in before anyone else is that many times I never realize the full potential of the platform. This is not because I’m not paying close enough attention, but because when these services first launch they’re usually not that great. Listening to what others are now doing with these platforms is really eye-opening, and also hearing about new ventures into social media type marketing. Some of the speakers that I had the pleasure of listening to include:

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Welcome to part 2 of the series! Before starting this tutorial, please complete “Designing a Professional Website from Scratch – Part 1”.

For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to go over slicing images. You may download my sliced images in order to follow along, but please note that I am not including the social networking icons or the photo. I don’t believe that I have the right to redistribute these. I included the link the photo in the last article, and you can download the social networking icons from the original creator.

Also, remember to download the 960 Grid CSS Framework. This will give us a big step in the right direction.

With that out of the way, we’re ready to begin.

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Many SEO experts have gotten their professions down to a science (or maybe more of an art-form). You should not give up trying to compete with the major players. SEO can be achieved through the use of well-written and compelling content.

On the web, content is king. I know that you’ve heard it many times before, but it’s the truest expression for getting visitors to your website, and converting those visitors into buyers. Many businesses decide to redesign their websites without considering the fact that their content is old and dated.

When redesigning your website, take the opportunity to evaluate every single piece of content on your site. Here are some steps toward making your content stronger, thus improving the rank of your site in search engines.

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Yesterday Google announced the launch of "Google Caffeine". Caffeine is a new search index that enables Google to serve searchers with the freshest possible results. The way that Google currently works is that it indexes pages in its directory at a rate of about once in about two weeks, depending on the content source (more regular and notable content producers get indexed more frequently). Caffeine indexes small parts of the web at the rate of  hundreds of thousands of pages per second.

What this means for you is that the more regular that you produce content, the higher in search results that you will appear in your given industry. What better way of producing content is there than a business blog? Not only blogs, but what about social networking sites? Now is the time to boost your SERPs, and hop on the social networking bandwagon!