Geek Daily

Here is what I found interesting this week.

Unit tests are for functionality, not code!
The prevailing philosophy in regards to unit testing is writing your tests before your code. In practice, this happens a lot less than it should. Why should we write our unit tests first?

Turn Google App Engine into your own Personal Content Delivery Network (CDN)
As anybody who has run a growing website or blog knows, response time is going to get worse with the more users you have visiting your site. The users come from all angles, RSS feeds, homepage visits, search engine visits, people sealing your static files that you host, and pretty much anything else that can be served over HTTP. The solution to this problem is to off load your static content on to a Content Delivery Network or CDN. CDN providers cost a lot of money though, so it is nothing for us mere mortals with one server can afford.

But thanks to Google anyone can now run their own CDN for free on Googles servers. Lucky for you and me Google has made the process really painless and you can even have the CDN under you own domain name. In my case static.coderjournal.com.

10 Universal Truths of SEO
Google is great. I use its services on a daily basis and love the traffic it sends to my websites. As smart SEO professionals point out, however, Google isn’t the only search engine around, and may not be the biggest, baddest search engine on the block forever.

Well do you? SEO is such an important part of running an application or a website. If done properly it can rocket your site to success but if not done properly you can be left in a dazed heap of failure. So what is SEO?

SEO stands for Seach Engine Optimization and means setting up and marketing your website in a way that maximizes your exposure on seach engines. This involves using the proper semantic HTML markup to begin with, writing your content using specific keywords you want to be found for in searches, and getting links back to your site from other popular sites to improve your seach ranking.

This may sound simple enough but it is a huge task and requires a lot of insight into the SEO market. So what do you do?

Take Dan Durick for example. Dan focuses on car dealer SEO. That’s right the SEO market is large enough to allow for specialization. Each market requires special knowledge and insight to promote a site to it’s full potential.

It is clear from reading the articles on Dan’s blog that he knows what he is talking about when it comes to promoting a car dealership website. He demonstrates in one article how the decline in search traffic for dar dealerships is directly representative of the lagging economy. His data shows that sales are down this year and the search traffic follows a similar curve.

This skill is important to an SEO. Firstly, it will help you keep your job when you can present the hard, cold facts to a disappointed manager that wants to blame him for the decline in seach traffic. It is also important for the customer so they can understand how things work and how they can adapt to the ever changing seach market.