Maintaining rank and attracting organic traffic from Google requires constant, continuous work, and there are plenty of ways to shoot yourself in the foot. We all compete for this traffic; getting angry at Google and writing a pissed-off blog post won't change her ranking - stepping up to the plate and competing for the traffic using white-hat SEO, semantic markup, webmaster tools, syndication through social media, etc. is the only way forward. SEO has changed - adapt or die.
Single page sites with scrolling animations and large fonts seem to be all the rage right now. I'm on the fence - this can work, but I agree, it's already become a 2013 web-design cliche.
My thoughts are, your competitors can already scrape your Twitter followers. It's a legitimate concern, but you also can't live in fear of your competitors.
How about a native app for iOS & Android with a big red button that, if they click it and confirm, puts the user immediately on the phone with a suicide prevention counselor.
SEO has evolved however much of the published SEO advice is stuck in the past. People are proclaiming "SEO is dead"... that will only be true the day people stop using search engines to find information, more like "SEO has changed". There's a new SEO in town. What exactly is the new SEO you ask?
Where do you get your news? No where near $650m was spent on Healthcare.gov (but, perhaps maybe it should considering the project grew considerably in scope when so many states refused to setup their own exchanges).
So as I thought, you were completely misinformed. The story for that link has been updated:
> Correction: We miscalculated the expenditures related to the healthcare exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act, and incorrectly attributed the total cost of these expenditures.
Another link in that thread (as noted below), contains the actual amount of money:
> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded CGI $55.7 million to launch Healthcare.gov, its central Obamacare health exchange website. Over the full five years of the contract, CGI could receive as much as $93.7 million.
$650m turns into $55m real quick and I'd bet a lot of fixed costs for things like hardware and software licenses made the actual figure even smaller. That was for two years, so $28M a year or $2.3M a month. Considering the cost of developers alone that doesn't seem like a ton, especially when developers are only a small part of the challenge.
I'm glad I didn't get the contract. I sure wouldn't want to build an exchange to handle many billions of dollars worth of transactions (and be responsible for millions of tax records!) on that kind of budget. Doubly so with talk radio , Fox News and the WSJ watching my every move.
If a startup came up with a way for any American to buy health insurance in one place it would be valued in the billions of dollars (even with a fail whale on demo day).
Yea that article caused a lot of confusion amongst folks.
Personally, I don't think that the $650m has to apply for the one contract (healthcare.gov) for the general act to be quested like the post above ('and we get THIS')?
As for your math - sounds reasonable, but wow my expectations of what $55m can yield are vastly different than how you rationalized it.
It's a lot of money in some ways and not a lot of money in others. It's an exchange that will be used by millions of people who will make decisions to spend thousands of dollars a year... The amount the exchange costs is a fraction of a rounding error in the scheme of things. I'm sure the insurance companies themselves have spent vastly more just getting their systems set up.
Currently this is only a basic SEO auditing tool, mainly on-site factors. I built this last night using PHP & WordPress as my starting point. Going to make this much more sophisticated over time, and the goal is to keep it free. Think of this version as a bare-bones "On-Site SEO Auditor", it's a great starting point for SEO work.
Right now it provides the following checks: Current Pagerank, Website URL, Blacklist Records, Website Speed, Domain Name Rating, Homepage Title Rating, Description Rating, Keywords Rating, Rich Content Rating, Image ALT Tags, Image Titles, Title Headers, Robots.txt File, Inbound Links, Outbound Links, DoFollow Links, NoFollow Links.
