SEO is an integral part of marketing and branding today (read Internet or social media marketing) and it has grown tremendously in last couple of years. Few years back; for us SEO was just keywords and Meta tags but Google has forced everyone to change their strategy and go beyond the basics.

From basics standpoint I think Google has simple rule, if you have most relevant data that user is looking for you must be listed on top. If you are searching for a ‘Dog’ then you should get most important sites about dogs on top and perhaps that’s why we always get Wikipedia listed on top of all the lists because it is consider as the most authenticated information on majority of topics.

Albeit, Google or for matter of fact all search providers have the best technology in the world, I believe they are still more a ‘business’ algorithms and programs; they are still not a natural. I think it is creating ‘consumerism’ on information and it is more like ‘Rich get Richer and poor get poorer’.

Today majority of search results (Except few like Wikipedia) are fabricated and are really not natural. Creative writing is no more ‘creative’ it is more mechanical. Creative writers first now list their keywords that they want to target and then they start framing sentences around that. It is absolutely neither a creative nor natural. They many times ‘spin’ (that means creating 100 articles from same contents) from single article.

I really doubt if SEO is helping quality of information to reach more users. Information should be accurate, useful and easily available but what we see is artificial and fabricated on majority of cases.

Let me explain this by an example, if John is a scientist and writes good articles on astronomy; do all search engines list his articles at top of search results without him making any extra efforts. I really don’t think so. He will not get listed on top or ‘clicked’; to achieve this he needs to spend lots of money and there is no limit to this, he can even spend his entire fortune in SEO. He needs to hire a web designing company who can design his website/blog which is search engine friendly; he needs SEO guy who can published his article on thousands of websites and bogs; he needs link building guy who will write dummy (nonsense) articles based on his topics and keywords and then publish on all possible places.

I am really not against SEO (how can me? It is my business) but as it happens with any technology; this is the other side of SEO. I am sure and I know that all search engines are making improvements so it gets more ‘natural’ rather ‘fabricated’. If you cross the limit they sometimes blacklist you as well. So be naturally fabricated and technically they call it ‘Grey-hat methods’ (Not a white-hat or Black-hat)

When we started PHP development in 1999 we had no idea about the future. We started because that was only an option given to us by an employer or by customers. We were still learning the technology by reading and PHP manual was the only reference available at that time and we used to read the manual one by one.

It is correctly said that you cannot join dots forward, you can only do it backward and how it is true when I think about the way I started learning PHP. I started because it was only language that was being use at the company I Joined; I was more a Microsoft guy and only knew ASP at that time. On first day I learnt ‘echo’ and ‘mail’ function of PHP and that really surprised me. How easy it was! The simplicity and easy syntax attracted me towards the language and it was smooth and easy path the learn the language

We never thought (even dreamt) that world’s most popular website Facebook after the Google will be running on PHP.  I really feel good now that I started learning a promising technology.

PHP is now becoming more a technology rather than just a scripting language.  There are numerous websites which advocates the PHP and debate continues. From a programmer standpoint, I don’t think that any other language is having a strong combination of simplicity and robustness.   There are technologies which are strong and robust but may not be as simple as PHP.

Even from businesses’ perspective it really does have a competitive advantage, from my experience with couple of other technologies; I know that it takes almost double efforts and cost to develop similar project with technology other than PHP. Of course this is really not a rule but it is probably correct at with reference to projects in which I have been involved so far.

Albeit, PHP is our best choice, we are not prejudiced and we work on any technology (.net, asp.net, PHP, Facebook, Joomla, Java, Modx  etc) which provides business and we must be learning a few new in recent future.