This is a welcome change to us here at Oracast as we have expressed, for a very long time, that (unnatural) link building has become analogous to spam, and Google has been rewarding people who abuse link building for far too long. This announcement means that the party is over for companies who are abusing SEO techniques. Here is a brief excerpt of what Matt Cutts had to say:

The idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.

So that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the Google Bot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive so that people don’t do SEO—we handle that—and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page, or whatever they exchange way too many links, or whatever they are doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention and we continue to work on it, and it is an active area where we’ve got several engineers on my team working on that right now…”

[And later after talking about the positives of SEO] “Absolutely there are some people who take it too far. What we’re mindful of is when someone says, “We’re White Hat. We continue to do the right thing, and we see the Black Hats who are over optimizing or going too far, and they seem to be doing too well.” So we’ve been working on changes to try to make sure that if you are a White Hat or if you’ve been doing very little SEO that you are going to not be affected by this change. But if you’ve been going way far beyond the pale, then that’s the sort of thing where your site might not rank as highly as it did before.

Matt has once again proven that our SEO process is white-hat, reliable, and will survive future Google algorithm changes because our goal is to make sure that your website is structured correctly, easily crawlable, and provides your target audience with optimized content and a great user experience. Going beyond the basics is becoming dangerous.

We have 2 positions available:
The immediate position will require that the chosen candidate have a strong JavaScript knowledge primarily with jQuery as we will be creating the front end application in HTML/JavaScript (no PHP) to interact with an API pulling JSON data. HTML and CSS knowledge will also be critical. While you will work on this project almost exclusively for the first 3 months, depending on your abilities you may be given tasks for other projects that could be HTML, CSS and primarily PHP based.

Additionally we are always looking for skilled PHP developers with extra consideration for Zend experience.

What We Are Looking For?
- someone that can see the whole picture
- someone that can analyze requirements
- someone that can read and write English clearly
- someone that is dedicated and enjoys web development
- someone with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP experience
- someone that can provide references
- someone that is comfortable working from home and can work at least a good part of the day during regular office hours
- someone in North America

Why Work With Us?
- we are a small company with other remote developers
- we are passionate about what we do and have fun doing it
- you have a flexible schedule that can be set out in advance
- you have the luxury of working at home with no commute and we don’t care if you are in your PJs

Please submit the ALL of the following information if you are interested to careers@oracast.com:
- name and email for now
- location (city, state/province) you would be working
- hourly rate expected (paid in currency of your country)
- resume (can be brief if you like) with a quick cover letter as part of the same document (PDF, Word, RTF, TXT format)

A web-based, centralized project management system can help boost your productivity and make your operations more efficient. Managing time effectively within your company will help deliver projects on time, on budget and increase profits.

Many companies are looking for an alternative to spreadsheets and commercial software; especially when it comes to managing projects or jobs. The ability to keep a the pulse of each project is faster and easier with a web application. Converting your existing project management processes onto an online platform isn’t hard; in fact it’s quite easy. Once it’s up and running, all of your team members can access the necessary features of the application, such as entering expense line items, with any web-enabled device such as PC’s, Laptops, iPhones and iPads.

Web Applications have fostered the ability to centralize data so that your customers, suppliers, vendors, employees, and stakeholders can easily access and share important information, instantly, from anywhere in the world. Furthermore, centralized Web Applications have eliminated the hassle of painful software installations, upgrades, and expensive licensing costs associated with traditional software.

Not only is your data centralized with a web-based project management system, but it is accessible by anyone from anywhere with an internet connection and the correct log-in credentials.

In Summary, web-based project management can:

• Increase productivity and accessibility
• Manage projects/jobs easier
• Centralize your data (tasks, expenses, resources, financials, etc)
• Provide enhanced security through user roles
• Instantly generate valuable reports
• Allow your team to communicate with customers
• And more!

In our opinion, a website should be doing one of two things (if not both): make you money by generating leads, or save you money by making your operations more efficient. When looking at your website with these two components in mind, is your website working? Our philosophy is to make your website an investment; not an expense.

Making you money: Lead generation is the name of the game. Whether you are using Organic SEO to move your website to the first page of search results or whether you are implementing a Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign, the key objective is to attract qualified leads. Once you have the lead, your website needs to be structured in such a way that will help convert the lead into a sale or, at the very least, qualify them further into a hot lead.

In addition, if you have considered implementing a “drip marketing” campaign, it’s important to have a strategy that will build-up your “prospects” database that will enable you to provide education-based marketing techniques such as frequent newsletters, whitepapers, and auto-responders.

Saving you money: If you were able to save time by becoming more efficient in your operations, resulting in higher profits and greater savings, would you do it? Many people would, some wouldn’t, but a lot of them don’t know how. If you manage the operations of your business using spreadsheets or off-the-shelf commercial software, we can help you become more efficient by create a web application that is tailor-made for your business. Imagine how nice life would be if you could manage your entire operations online, in a centralized location, and have the ability to instantly track and report on various projects/jobs/tasks.

If you would like to learn more about any of the topics discussed, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We want to make sure that you are well-informed of all of the capabilities a website can bring to your business. Most importantly, we want to make sure that you have a website that works.

If your website cannot be found by search engines, potential customers won’t be able to find you, and you will end up missing out on the incredible opportunities available to you through search engines. So where to begin? Much like building a house, it takes careful planning and a strong foundation. The same holds true for web design and search engine optimization. The foundation in this case: keywords.

Researching the right keywords for your website is critical to the success of your online strategy. Through best practice optimization techniques, searchers will be able to find your website when they enter the keywords that your website is optimized for; ideally on the first page but that depends on the competitiveness of your industry (among other things). On the flip side, if your website does not employ any SEO, the searchers will find your competitors.

If you are an Oil & Gas service company that is looking for an alternative to spreadsheets or commercial software, we want to speak with you. Our custom-built web applications can help your business become more productive and efficient while saving money in the process. Furthermore, as your business changes, your web application can scale to those changes, and can provide a framework that can be accessed by advanced technologies such as a Blackberry or iPhone Apps that can be leveraged by employees/contractors in the field.

Here is a quick list of benefits that a custom web application can bring to your business:

• Custom-built to suit your unique business processes and systems
• Effectively manage any aspect of your business
• Manage invoices and automatically submit to 3rd party solutions such as OpenInvoice
• Accessible from anywhere with an internet connection
• Secure
• Scalable
• Provide easy database backups
• Instant reports without human error
• Excel spreadsheet import
• Export analytical reports in Excel or PDF format

Each web application is unique; your web app may have different features but it will be built to suit your unique processes. This flexibility is a clear advantage over spreadsheets and commercial software. Web applications are specifically built for your business.

Contact us today and let’s discuss how a custom web application will benefit your business, improve your operations, and save you money in the process.

• Recent events or hot topics. For recent events or hot topics that begin trending on the web, you want to find the latest information immediately. Now when you search for current events like [occupy oakland protest], or for the latest news about the [nba lockout], you’ll see more high-quality pages that might only be minutes old.

• Regularly recurring events. Some events take place on a regularly recurring basis, such as annual conferences like [ICALP] or an event like the [presidential election]. Without specifying with your keywords, it’s implied that you expect to see the most recent event, and not one from 50 years ago. There are also things that recur more frequently, so now when you’re searching for the latest [NFL scores], [dancing with the stars] results or [exxon earnings], you’ll see the latest information.

• Frequent updates. There are also searches for information that changes often, but isn’t really a hot topic or a recurring event. For example, if you’re researching the [best slr cameras], or you’re in the market for a new car and want [subaru impreza reviews], you probably want the most up to date information.

Tell me, what is the purpose of your website? Is it purely informational or do you want people to find you on search engines? What keywords are you targeting? Is your website optimized around those keywords? Is your website designed with “calls to action” to convert leads into customers? The list goes on.

The point here is that having a website just isn’t enough. If you want to be on the first page of Google and outsell your competitors, having an online strategy is critical to the success of your overall business plan and marketing efforts.

Give us a call or send us an email to schedule a phone call or face-to-face meeting and we can discuss some strategies that will take your website to the next level.