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Our Journal
Apple TV: Not just a ‘hobby’ anymore
The Apple TV product is a small device that connects to your TV’s HDMI port. It is not the oft-rumored 50″ HDTV built by Apple. We may never see an Apple branded television, but what we are about to see is the Apple TV go to the next level.
Today, Apple TV allows you to bring different entertainment options to your HDTV. You can watch Disney’s Frozen that you purchased on iTunes. You can binge watch season 2 of House of Cards using your Netflix account. You can stream your iPhoto images and “My Photo Stream” right to your TV. You can even connect your Mac laptop, iPad, and iPhone to the Apple TV and mirror what is on those screens. All of this for a one-time charge of $100 makes Apple TV a very compelling addition to your living room.
Apple does not discount their products because well they don’t need to. When you can get a $25 iTunes gift card with purchase of an Apple TV, it raises red flags. Combine that with the fact that Apple sold more than $1 billion of Apple TV hardware and downloads, a new hardware version with new features is likely imminent.
Look for more exclusive content such as WWE’s channel that was recently launched. Look for gaming to be an added feature. Candy Crush on a 50 inch HD screen! Use your iPad or iPhone as a controller as the game plays on your TV. Maybe a redesigned user interface as well to better gel with iOS7.
What does the future hold for Apple TV? Perhaps one day you will log onto the Apple TV and have apps for ESPN and ABC that you pay monthly subscriptions for so you can truly cut the cord and pay for only the channels you actually want. Now there’s a concept.
The Importance of SEO
If you google “The Importance of SEO“, you’ll get over seven million results, many of which are SEO-optimized themselves. But what exactly is SEO? The words stand for “Search Engine Optimization”, which most people know, but significantly less understand. What is known is that most people get where they are going with google. Sure, everyone can remember facebook.com and where it goes, but I promise you that very few people will remember your exact domain.
Basically, giant computers inside Google or Bing or Yahoo have tiny robots (they do) that scour the web and crawl for new and changing websites. The information gathered is then placed into an algorithm, like the famous Google Algorithm, which does the heavy lifting. The result of these computations? The order of the results that match the search queries of billions of users a day.
How does all of this work? Well there is a multi-billion dollar industry in place to create SEO-optimized websites and they’ll tell you that it is very difficult in order to get upwards of $10 $100 $1000 a month from even mid-sized businesses.
If you follow the changes in SEO, however, you’ll see that it doesn’t take a mortgage payment to rank higher on Google. The first step of the process is temper your expectations. Everyone wants to be #1 on the list or on the first page, but imagine you are a budding social network or a local bank, putting in “Philadelphia bank” is going to give you giant names like Wells Fargo, Citizen’s Bank and even more local networks like Susquehanna and Beneficial. Knowing this fact will go a long way into planning your organic search blueprint.
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Wait, what the hell is organic search? Glad you asked. There are two kinds of search: Organic, which is free and makes up 99% of the sites on search engines and Paid, which involve a transaction with Google / Bing in order to get your website predominantly featured at the top or on the side of a search. JX2 Development handles both and has nearly a decade of experience doing paid search campaigns. Email us if you are interested.
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Back to what we were talking about, the next step is to know how all the coding works for SEO. The algorithms used to rely on things called “meta keywords”, which many people think of when we talk about SEO. Meta Keywords are a list of topics that are inserted into the unseen code for websites to categorized. Well, they aren’t used anymore and haven’t been since 2009.
Today, the methods used to rank sites is much more complexed. They involve things like back-linking and focus keywords, all used to get the right pages at the top. Search engines look at the headlines, images, and other things in an effort to best understand each website. Google now looks at other websites that link to your website, to better understand the content within. If your homepage appears on 1000s of other sites, you’re going to rank near the top. If it does not, or the site isn’t SEO optimized, you’re site is going to suffer.
At JX2 Development, we understand all of this stuff and the implementation is rolled into every website we build. Contact us if you’d like to talk about redesigning your website and getting your self, or your company, higher in the Google ranks.