Minimalist design can be somewhat difficult to understand at first, (even for the more seasoned designer) and hard to master. A minimalist website contains subtle, simple yet elegant elements that aren’t visually overwhelming and can distract a visitor from the main focus of the site. In art, minimalism refers to the awareness of fundamental qualities that attract a certain type of attention opposite from the norm.

By Nenshad Bardoliwalla

In the wake of the long-running massive industry consolidation in the Enterprise Software industry that reached its zenith with the acquisitions of Business Intelligence market leaders Hyperion, Cognos, and Business Objects in 2007, one could certainly have been forgiven for being less than optimistic about the prospects of innovation in the Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Performance Management markets.  This is especially true given the dozens of innovative companies that each of these large best of breed vendors themselves had acquired before being acquired in turn.  While the pace of innovation has slowed to a crawl as the large vendors are midway through digesting the former best of breed market leaders, thankfully for the health of the industry, nothing could be further from the truth in the market overall.  This market has in fact shown itself to be very vibrant, with a resurgence of innovative offerings springing up in the wake of the fall of the largest best of breed vendors. So what are the trends and where do I see the industry evolving to?  Few of these are mutually exclusive, but in order to provide some categorization to the discussion, they have been broken down as follows:

As already mentioned, search engines have no means to index directly extras like images, sounds, flash movies, javascript. Instead, they rely on your to provide meaningful textual description and based on it they can index these files. In a sense, the situation is similar to that with text 10 or so years ago – you provide a description in the metatag and search engines uses this description to index and process your page. If technology advances further, one day it might be possible for search engines to index images, movies, etc. but for the time being this is just a dream.

Based on the previous section, you might have gotten the impression that the algorithms of search engines try to humiliate every designer effort to make a site gorgeous. Well, it has been explained why search engines do not like image, movies, applets and other extras. Now, you might think that search engines are far too cheeky to dislike dynamic URLs either. Honestly, users are also not in love with URLs like http://domain.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5 because such URLs do not tell much about the contents of the page.

The main purpose of SEO is to make your site visible to search engines, thus leading to higher rankings in search results pages, which in turn brings more traffic to your site. And having more visitors (and above all buyers) is ultimately the goal in sites promotion. For truth’s sake, SEO is only one alternative to promote your site and increase traffic – there are many other online and offline ways to do accomplish the goal of getting high traffic and reaching your target audience. We are not going to explore them in this tutorial but just keep in mind that search engines are not the only way to get visitors to your site, although they seem to be a preferable choice and a relatively easy way to do it.

1. Targetting the wrong keywords

This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can’t think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool, for instance, the Website Keyword Suggestion tool will help you find keywords that are good for your site.

Its always better to know in advance what you can expect from a career in SEO.

Some Good Reasons to Choose SEO as Your Career

1. High demand for SEO services

Once SEO was not a separate profession – Web masters performed some basic SEO for the sites they managed and that was all. But as sites began to grow and make money, it became more reasonable to hire a dedicated SEO specialist than to have the Web master do it. The demand for good SEO experts is high and is constantly on the rise.

Sites like digg.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.com etc can bring you a LOT of traffic. How about getting 20,000 and more visitors a day when your listing hits the front page?
Getting to the front page of these sites is not as difficult as it seems. I have been successful with digg and del.icio.us (and not so much with Reddit though the same steps should apply to it as well) multiple times and have thus compiled a list of steps that have helped me succeed:

After you have been dealing for some time with SEO on your own, you discover that no matter how hard you try, your site does not rank well or that your site ranks well but optimizing it for search engines takes all your time and all your other tasks lag behind. If this is the case with you, maybe it is better to consider hiring a SEO company to do the work for you. With so many SEO companies out there, you can’t complain that you have no choice. Or is it just the opposite – so many companies but few reliable?

The wise choice of the right keywords you will optimize for is the first and crucial step to a successful SEO campaign. If you fail on this very first step, the road ahead is very bumpy and most likely you will only waste your (or your client’s) money and time. There are many ways to determine which keywords to optimize for and usually the final list of them is made after a careful analysis of what the online population is searching for, which keywords have your competitors chosen and above all – which are the keywords that you feel describe your site best. All of this is great and certainly this is the way to go but if you want to increase your chances of success, additional research is never too much, especially when its results will save you the shots in the dark.