I feel like I do a pretty damn good job of staying focused most days at work, along with managing multitasking. I definitely subscribe to the Lifehacker article suggestion below to the suggestions related to a good pair of noise canceling headphones.

The other couple of suggestions are great too. Good tips and ways to keep focused and productive during work hours.

Set Up Timed Playlists and Non-Intrusive Distractions to Stay Focused and Productive at Work

So while I don’t like to make it a habit to job hop, an opportunity came up that made sense for me to jump from iContact after only nine months. I’d say the job market is starting to pick up here in Triangle of North Carolina. I’ve been getting a lot of calls and inquiries about web developer positions.

But the one I jumped at was working with my best friend. We’ve worked before together and meshed really well. Looking forward to that, and in more of an agency setting again.

More info on this in a bit… Thanks for everyone’s support in the past, in he present and in the future.

Check out the first of several videos to come in the next couple weeks about Carl’s job hunt. Funny stuff and I think the production value of the whole thing is freakin’ great.

There is a whole industry related to search engine optimization and whether you’re a web developer, web designer, or just a blogger, search engine optimization is something you and/or your clients will have at least some interest in, and spend some time on. Search engine optimization is all about making your web sites show up close to the top of the lists for relevant keywords to your site.

Many companies out there charge big bucks for the basics and common sense I’m spelling out in this article. Despite how their marketing and sales pitch may argue otherwise, there is no quick fix, nor a magic bullet to make your web site appear at the top of Google’s list (or any search engine for that matter. The article below I’ve composed based on my own personal experiences building web sites over the years both personally and professionally.

Content, Content, Content
First of all, it’s all about original content, like I said back in August, content is king. I’ve seen people setup blogs that all they do is rehash images and text from other sites. There’s no way you’re not going to link to other sites and talk about content you found other places, but you need unique content. Give your take on any content you’re referring to. There’s nothing wrong with sharing with your readers things that they would find interesting, just give your take – expand on the coverage based on your background and experiences.

Find Your Focus
Alright, with this one, do as I say, not as I do. Keefer Madness is all over the place. Lately, there’s a lot of cycling-related articles, insight, etc. and I’m finding lots of people are coming to Keefer Madness for that content. Rock on! But, then, I’ll throw in random crap like what we’re doing in the yard or whatever.

Now Keefer Madness isn’t a business venture, so I give myself a little bit of a pass on the focused content. I’m not making a cent on Keefer Madness. Yeah, I’ve got Google ads there on the right. Feel free to click on those links for me, but it’s not even going to buy me a meal annually at this point.

Valid Markup
I’m realizing all the tips I’m writing up here are beneficial to search engine optimization, but also just good ideas in general. In my professional web building (where I’m not using a Word Press template like I am for Keefer Madness), I make every effort to make clean markup and I validate all my pages with the W3C Markup Validation Service. Originally, the theory here was to make good code that wouldn’t trip up search engines. These days though, I do it as much to eliminate browser errors and speed up user browsing. As CSS, JavaScript and the HTML itself gets more and more complicated, I like pages to validate to rule out things such as unclosed tags, incorrectly nested tags, etc.

Along with the valid markup is using HTML to it’s fullest. Use heading tags (h1, h2, etc.), rather than a span tag with a style class of headline. Some search engines weight a h1 headline with a lot more weight than something just surrounded by a div tag. Utilize paragraph tags, bold (or emp) tags, etc. You’re giving readers and search engine bots alike clues to the hierarchy within your site and its content.

External Files
Weight is given by search engine to the content based on where it appears on the page. The footer obviously doesn’t get as much weight as something in the upper third of the page. This seems logical. With that said, do everything to get your real content high on the page. A really really simple thing to do is to externally link to whatever you can: Avoid having all your CSS and JavaScript code in the head or scattered in your page. In 99% of the modern web sites you’re building, you’ll have both CSS and JS, but link to them externally like this:

<style type=”text/css” media=”all”>@import “/css/standard.css”;</style>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”/lib/js/swfobject.js”></script></pre>

Title Tags Rule
Remember that part above about higher up content getting more weight. What’s higher than just about everything, other than your opening <html&gt: and &lthead>? The title tag! Make these unique throughout your site and descriptive. You can throw a few relevant keywords in here too, as long as they’re actually showing up on the given page, but minimize doing this too. There’s absolutely nothing you should do to optimize content that should detract from the user experience. All the search engine optimization in the world, isn’t worth anything if users can’t (or won’t) use your site. My rule of thumb on title tags – most specific information first in the title tag, filtering down to the site name/domain:

Example:
My great Review of Rock Band : Xbox 360 Reviews : Reviews : Keefer Madness

Meta Tags are Dead
It used to be meta tags, especially the keywords and description ones were utilized by search engines to get a feel for a page’s content. Due to abuse, meta tags now are pretty worthless. Most search engines just ignore them presently. That being said, we get a lot of clients that still want them and throw the buzz word out there. Having them present isn’t going to hurt anything, and as a rule, we still put them in. I prefer to use only the ones below:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”" />
<meta name=”description” content=”" />
<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />

Quality (Not Quantity) Links
This is another no-brainer, but one you absolutely cannot force or fake. If you do your job on content and finding your focus, over time, people will link to you and refer to your site and your articles and content. Don’t go out there soliciting links. It’s a lot of effort for not much return.

Now don’t get me wrong, nothing helps a site more than having links to your site, but you shouldn’t be trading links or begging for links. Write good quality content and give people legitimate reasons to want to link to you. They’ll do it on their own when you’re content is worthy.

The one thing you can do in terms of linking, is create more internal links. Even in this article, you can see I’ve referred to other articles on Keefer Madness. Don’t overdo it, but when it’s natural and relevant, post links from one piece of content on your site to another. Again, search engines and users a like will benefit from the deeper linking.

Regular Content
Write and create content on a regular basis for your site. Both users and search engines are more likely to revisit a site that has regular and fresh content. It reflects better on your site too if you’re putting a regular effort into it. My rule of thumb for Keefer Madness is at least an article a day. This isn’t always practical or applicable to every personal or business site out there, but a regular effort will be rewarded with some repeat revisits.

Alt and Title Tags
Every image should have a descriptive title tag. Every image should have a descriptive alt tag. Period. Also, with images on your site, make the file names descriptive. Rather than image001.jpg, make it keefer-mowing-the-lawn.jpg to match that alt tag.

Patience
If you go into your site and make positive changes using the above summary, things won’t change over night. Have patience with both getting your visitor numbers up and your organic search engine placement up. Neither will happen overnight. Make some changes to existing content, and be aware of the above suggestions as you make new content.

Like I said, nothing here is much more than some good guidelines to take into consideration, with most being common sense. None of this is scientifically proven, just my educated guesses and experiences over the past decade or so of working on the web. Best of luck out there.

So it’s been a full week’s stress and headaches rolled into only three days. Luckily, it’s worked out where my friends, Bret and Tina are getting married Saturday. I had the forethought to take Friday off for the rehearsal, pick up my tux, etc. and am really thanking my lucky stars. Amanda’s been slow at work and it’s looking like she’ll be off now on Friday too.

I start building a new web site at work tomorrow, but hoping I can make big progress on that without too many outside interruptions. The hope is to have the homepage built by lunch time and get an internal page “template” setup by days end. Regardless, the real stress should be behind. *fingers crossed*

I’ve also got my third race of the week coming on Sunday. There’s always some anxious energy and a bit of health nervousness spawning from that. Wish me luck on that one.

So we all finally got a much-needed hardware upgrade at work. I went from a PowerMac G5 single 1.8 Ghz (read: the original G5 machine) to a souped up, dual quad-core (8 freaking processors) 3.0 Ghz Mac Pro with 8GB of RAM. It was absolutely phenomenal how much faster it was! We’re talking night and day. A Photoshop document that before took me 10 minutes to open (literally – I’d go to the bathroom, get a drink, come back and it still would have a progress bar up), now opens without a hiccup or progress bar at all!

I had a hell of a time slowing this machine down. The only thing that seemed to tax it was Parallels. I didn’t play around with that much at all.

It should really help my productivity, with the machine waiting for me instead of the other way around. Speaking of productivity, I signed up for a free account with RescueTime (in beta currently) to assess efficiency and productivity at work and it’s been fun, interesting and educational. I highly recommend it for getting an idea of how you’re spending your days (or nights).

The image to the right gives you a little glimpse at RescueTime, but I’m really liking the data it is giving me so far, though I don’t have a perfect (nor very big) sample yet. It’s cool – you can set examples based on the sites, tags, etc. So like I have setup I want to be doing at least 5 hours of web development daily, and less than 1 hour of total iChat. It’s cool stuff, and you can tag things with multiple tags. I feel like I’m getting a lot out of it thus far.

Today wasn’t as productive as basically the whole morning, I was installing apps and getting the settings, preferences, etc. perfected on my new machine.

Damn! I was real close to missing my post for the day. It’s like 3 minutes before midnight!

Anyway, work’s been crazy busy. I’ve got more web sites to build than there are hours in the day. On one hand, it’s great – job security galore. On the other hand, it’s been stressful and I can’t keep going at this pace without some down time.

I’ve got basically two sites due tomorrow. I’m doing one during regular business hours, and this other I’ve been busting my butt on here at home. Luckily, I’m getting bonus cash for doing this one at home. All the time spent this evening on it has been pretty productive. I’d say I’m around 75% done with the site, though I’ve avoided one problem area with the site.

I’m not too tired as midnight approaches, but my throat it getting sore. I sure hope I’m not getting sick. Regardless, it’s bed time. Tomorrow will be another crazy busy and long day. I’ll have no reservations about leaving early as the week progresses though.

So work has shifted into high gear – with three sites needing to be built this week. For those who don’t know, I’m a pseudo-web developer, specializing in front end web technologies and the like – acronyms like HTML, CSS, SEO and PHP. Anyway, my work comes in waves and I’ve got a tsunami right now. I’m not complaining, as the days and weeks just fly by, but it’s definitely more stressful and I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water.

I’ve got a fair amount of job security, as I’ve got web site builds scheduled for the next two months solid. I have been getting overwhelmed and stressed, but I think most of both of those are self-inflicted. I pride myself on working well without much need for direction or prodding. I work efficiently and quickly most of the time, and have been recognized as such.

But whatever happens this year, I’m not letting all my hard work outside of work go to waste. I’ve done a ton of training and conditioning in the off season, and have started to see and feel those results. Last year, my team did sprint practices every Wednesday afternoon. I missed pretty much every single one of those, except a few right around our team sponsored race. Not this year. Regardless of the workload, I’m making the majority of those practices. I’m working to live, not the other way around.

I woke up this morning with ten hours of sleep behind me, fully rested. But I’m tired.

I’m tired of people being difficult and mean to each other. I’m tired of seeing good people being treated poorly. I’m tired of disorganization and having to do things multiple times because of the disorganization and the lack of the planning. I’m tired of the thought, “a lack of planning on your part, does not constitute and emergency on my part” popping into my head. But most of all, I’m just tired of people failing to recognize that they’re part of the problem.

I think Amanda and I are both experiencing this, along with most of my office.

Do You Have Job Burnout