As someone who has spent years talking about, participating in and observing the world of creative media, I recently realized that the “mobile future” I (and others) have been talking about is now the “mobile present”. This is not a particularly astute observation on my part, but I’ve felt this on a more visceral level recently after some recent observations.

• On a recent business trip I noticed many Amazon Kindles on the airplane, and on a completely anecdotal level I noticed many of them were in the hands of passengers whose hair was decidedly gray. It might sound a bit trite or condescending (it’s not meant to be) but to watch a 70-something browse and purchase e-books wirelessly while our plane was boarding was nothing short of amazing.
• For years, I have told students who were interested in getting in on the next “big thing” to start designing for mobile devices immediately. I no longer feel the need to say this as I keep coming across former students (originally trained in graphic and web design) gettin’ paid to design for mobile devices. The path for opportunity here is clear.
• Interestingly, although its cultural impact is a done deal (with 1 million units sold in 1 month), I have yet to see an iPad in the wild. The iPhone/iTouch, on the other hand, is *everywhere*, from the subways of NYC to the swamps of Savannah, I have seen more iPhones this month than I could have imagined.

So what does the mobile future hold in store for us? For hints of this what better place to look than the two innovators in the market: Apple and Google. Much has been written about the increasing competition between these two and it is inevitable that these two companies can only grow further apart. At heart are the similarities and differences in culture. The basic narrative goes like this: Apple’s success in the growing mobile market is largely due to their innovation and focus on the ease of use of their products.  Google also has a well-deserved reputation for creating simple interfaces however and because Google gets “the internet” they might steal Apple’s lead with the Droid.

You need only look at the  parallel moves each company has made in the last 6 months or so to see where we are headed.

• In December 2009 Apple bought Lala (once my favorite place to stream music online.) In May 2010 Google bought Simplify Media which was once my favorite place to share music with friends. In all likelihood these will form the basis of the upcoming Google Music versus iTunes Live.
• Also in May Google announces “Google TV” where TV meets the Web. Since May, Apple’s neglected Apple TV system has shown signs of resuscitation with recent news that they may begin streaming services (rather than just downloads) and rumors that the next-generation of Apple TV will share the same operating system as the iPad/iPhone (iOS).

There are other worthy examples of this competition: Apple’s iAd platform being an exceptionally interesting shot across the bow of Google. In the end it helps to keep in mind that although they seem headed on collision course, they have fundamentally different businesses. Google will always look for new ways to get people on the Web, because that’s where the ads are and that’s Google’s bread and butter. Apple is a hardware company that focuses on consumer mobile devices, only 25% of their 2010 revenue came from selling computers. Almost 60% of Apple’s revenue came from the combined sales of the iPhone, iPods and the iPad. Watching how Google and Apple compete over the next few years will be an interesting sideshow, but it is their similarities not their differences that will define what the mobile world will look like in 5 years.

In the mid 70′s and early 80′s I grew up in/around the town of Brattleboro, Vermont. Brattleboro back then (and to a degree still does) owed much of it’s character to a mix of architectural styles (primarily Victorian) and a healthy dose of 1960′s counterculture.

I was thinking recently about how much of this atmosphere I soaked in and assumed as normal, particularly in the downtown area of Main Street. Even the store names were psychedelic, here are some of my favorites:

• Llama, Toucan and Crow (Health food store)
• Captain Bullfrogs (Record Store)
• The Common Ground (Communal restaurant)
• Mole’s Eye Cafe (Bar)
• Candle in the Night (Oriental rug store)
• The Upper Crust (Bakery)

I’m sure there were many more, some lost to time, some lost to my memory. A few still exist I believe.

This article contains details on how I built my personal website over the last 6 months with some examples of how my site has fared in Google search results. SEO of course stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, and the lazy human is basically me (and perhaps you). You see, SEO is a minor concern to me in many ways, however I admit to being fascinated by how I “stack up” in the eyes of the search engine.

Before going much further have you read Derek Powazek’s article “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists”? If you’re short on time, go read his article instead of this one because there’s not a whole lot I can add.

You might be too lazy to read Derek’s article right now. I’ll present two of his main points regarding SEO: 1.)”The good advice is obvious, the rest doesn’t work.“. 2.) Regarding how to get traffic to your website : “Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.”

So where do you find the good advice mentioned in the first point? Just go to the source. Google publishes a starter guide to SEO. It’s a 20 page pdf that contains 99% of what you need to know. These strategies are “the secrets”, of which there are none. The rest of this post talks about some of the ways I used these strategies.

Reaping the seo benefits of thoughtful site design

Something interesting has happened with my site and the Google results for it and I’d like to tell you about it. Below there is a form field with the words “designer educator writer” filled in. This is hooked up to Google. Go ahead and press “Search” and then come back (Please!).

As of January 2010 when I wrote this, the top result of the search will bring up my website. (Here’s a screenshot in case things have changed!)

I thought this was pretty cool but I’m calling this the lazy guide because I had no intent of getting this spot. It was a natural byproduct of the steps I took while developing my site. Below are some of the strategies you can use for yours:

• Define your niche.. The three words “designer”, “educator” and “writer” are keywords. Submitted individually they return generic results on Google. However when submitted together they define a relatively small subset: one that happens to define me and what I do. That was a built-in advantage, there isn’t a whole lot of competition in my field apparently! So spend some time defining how you are different from everyone else out there on the Web.
• Build your site right.. There are a lot of foundational HTML and CSS techniques that I used while building my site. I’m not going to get into the details here, but that’s because these techniques are becoming increasingly well known, they include things such as proper use of heading tags, not using images for text, etc. There are a few things that stand out about the way I designed the site, however.

1. Make your site navigation relevant. The navigation of my site reflects the keywords. This seems so obvious that I feel silly writing it down, but content that relates to design is in the “Designer” section, content that relates to books I have worked on is in the “Writer” section and so on. This probably makes Google happy because the navigation is not only relevant to the content on the page but is hyperlinked text repeated dozens of times throughout the site.
2. Use page titles wisely. My page titles are very specific and reflect the organization of my site. Page titles on your website really matter. (We’re talking about the <title> tag here). I use a simple template on each page: [My name], [the section of the site] and [a few key words relating to the content]. As an example, the page title for the writer section is  “Jeremy Osborn: Writer (Adobe Classroom in a Book, Digital Classroom Dreamweaver CS4)”. Google likes title tags because they are genuinely useful. When someone bookmarks a page in their browser or a service like Delicious, the title tag info is what gets saved. Be sure to keep usability in mind though, a page title that is too long might get cut off.

• Write for the web A great resource on how to create content for the web is Kristina Halvorson’s article The Discipline of Content Strategy . Go read it.
• Get linked. After all the hard work that has taxed your lazy self, it’s time to put other people to work. The web is a popularity contest and when people link to your site you get more popular in Google’s view. Pretty much everyone knows this and there is an entire industry that tries to abuse this fact. However, links to your website seem to have more weight when they are relevant. So although I like it when someone writes in their blog “Jeremy Osborn is a pretty awesome dude. Go check out his website.” I like it a lot better when the hyperlinked text is relevant: “Jeremy Osborn is an amazing educator, a real-life hero if there ever was one.” You can’t necessarily control how other people link to you, only suggest it. Just remember, there’s a fine line between an honest and organic link to your site and one that is obviously manufactured.
  
  I want to point out that the number of incoming links to my site is actually extremely small, it’s the one place where I’m the most lazy. I could probably shore up my Google ranking if I took some time to solicit more incoming links from friends/colleagues.
• Leverage Social Media In my opinion, the one place where you can push limits are on your own profile pages for the social media sites: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Wherever I have a public profile online I make sure that any tagline is consistent with my “designer, educator, writer” theme. These sites are like free currency, there is value in their popularity and you still get to maintain your SEO integrity as long as you are up front with the fact you are using them for self-promotion.

You may be asking at this point why this qualifies as “lazy”, because this might sound like a bit of work. Remember that it was not a goal of mine to claim the #1 result for “designer, educator, writer”. My goal was to define myself in a unique way and then be consistent about it. That’s the hard part. Do that and focus on making great things rather than spending time and energy on SEO tricks.