Google kicked off its annual developers conference, Google I/O, on Wednesday, May 14, with a keynote lasting nearly four hours.

This is an introduction to Back Links.

This is an overview of the Anatomy of Back Links.

For us in the web design and development fields, we are increasingly challenged by an ever rotating list of new technologies. The latest is called "Responsive Design". It's probably the biggest thing to happen to web design since the ability to replace tables for layout using CSS divs for more control of website design. 

Responsive design solves the problem caused by the presence of so many mobile devices with varying screen sizes. Traditionally you would have dealt with this problem by detecting the phone or tablet used by those accessing your site and redirecting them to a dedicated mobile version of your site. But that approach turns out to be a total waste of effort, since it ends up being really hard to maintain two or more separate instances of your site.

Search engine optimization can take many forms. One element is to provide back links to your website. This can be a time consuming task but with continued focus, can make a big difference in your search rankings in Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. Backlinks or inbound links are links that are incoming to webpage or the whole website.  These incoming links are very essential to the rankings of search engines because a lot of search engines do have their own algorithms responsible in measuring the backlinks that a webpage or website has. Once they are measured, the algorithms will rank the webpages or websites that contains more backlinks higher.

So many small business have taken the leap into Search Engine Marketing with mixed results. Have a read on how one small business owner took the reigns and reexamined his results, fine tuned his companys performance and made substantial sales gains.

Over the last few years, I have made a conscious effort to find ways to get advice from other business owners. Writing this blog was the first thing I did, and I have found the feedback from commenters to be valuable. This year, in an effort to find a more focused set of advisers, I joined a Vistage business group. We meet once a month, and a portion of each meeting is devoted to analysis of business issues that each member presents. When a member of the group presents a problem, the other owners listen, ask questions and then suggest solutions.

Here's a great article about the benefits of organic SEO and why we feel ongoing support of our websites is so important when it comes to maximizing our customer budgets. This appeared in The New York Times on Wednesday, October 17, 2012. The link to the article can be found at the end of this article.

When Tom Telford helped found a vacation rental management company, Blue Creek Cabins, in 2001, he wanted a quick and easy way to connect with people looking to rent the 20 cabins he and his partner managed in and around the mountains of picturesque Helen, Ga.

That is when he heard about a program called AdWords being offered by a new company, Google. Finding the system relatively easy to use, Mr. Telford selected a few keywords, like “Helen GA cabin rentals,” and agreed to pay Google 60 cents every time someone performed a search and clicked on his ad.

Before long, the calls and e-mails started pouring in. “The results were phenomenal,” said Mr. Telford, whose company is used by property owners to market their cabins. Encouraged, he invested more in his pay-per-click advertising efforts, which in time included similar programs offered by Bing and Yahoo.

Search engines are the modern day equivalent to using the phone book to find something on the web. There are hundreds of millions of pages available, waiting to present information on an amazing variety of topics. The bad news about the Internet is that there are hundreds of millions of pages available, most of them titled according to the whim of their author, almost all of them sitting on servers with cryptic names. When you need to know about a particular subject, how do you know which pages to read? If you're like most people, you visit an Internet search engine.