Tom Kraak's (Seablick Consulting) presentation on Search Engine Optimization is now available as a webcast at CDUG.

DNN SEO

When you are a small business you have to take every opportunity you can to get your name and what you do in front of prospective customers. If you are a high tech company, one of the best ways is to have your company's link come up when someone does a search against one of the big search engines, Google, Microsoft Live Search, or Yahoo. Having your link pop up under certain circumstances could lead to considerable new business.

I have to admit, my own compay website, ACRITECH Corp, does not even show up when I search for software consulting companies in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

But after last Wednesday's Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CDUG)meeting, I am starting to understand why. We had a wonderful presentation on search engine optimization (SEO), which is the optimization of your website so that when you "google" it, your links will have a high enough rating to appear near the top of the non-paid links returned. Tom Kraak, of Seablick Consulting, gave an enjoyable and enlightening discussion of SEO for DotNetNuke websites.

A lot of what Tom covered involved how to use the important features effectively in DNN. In addition to that, he discussed how to better position and write content so that the search engine bots would be more likely to properly asssociate your content with your website, thereby increasing your ranking through proper "categorization" (my quotes). Without some of this customization from an out-of-the-box DotNetNuke website, a basic DNN site is going to get lost in the ocean of the Internet.

Well, if you missed this presentation you will be happy to know that we are working on presenting this as a webcast at the Capital DotNetNuke user group website in the near future.

jQuery is hot! And we have none other than Joe Brinkman, CTO of DotNetNuke Corp speaking at the Capital DotNetNuke User Group on January 21st (ATT building on Gallows Road, Vienna, Va).

Joe with give a brief introduction on what jQuery is, then how it is used in DotNetNuke. Very cool.

Our speaker next month at the Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CDUG) is Joe Brinkman. We are still working out the date and location of the meeting which we should lock down in the next week. We plan to move our meeting date because it falls within the week of the Presidential Inaguration, so we expect DC traffic to be a mess.

Joe Brinkman, DotNetNuke VP Core Technology and Co-founder, Microsoft MVP

Something I did not know about Joe until I read his bio is that he's a Naval Academy Grad. Of course, if he is a football fan, he must have been very excited about Navy's great season.

If you missed Quentin Gilbert's presentation on Agile Development, it is hoped he will give it again during one of the upcoming Code Camps. I have known Quentin for over a dozen years, and he has always been a great developer who was consumed with building quality applications, but he has come into his own as a speaker and practioner in Agile Development.

The thing I like about Quentin's presentation is that he mixes theory and experience together. No project runs perfectly, and there is much to learn from mistakes as well as successes.

Antonio and I welcomed the opportunity to have Quentin speak since Agile project management can be used not only for software/application development but also to manage the implementation of a web 2.0 content-management system. Our user group aims to support discussions not only on development but also on managing of DotNetNuke (and other content management systems, like SharePoint).