Reviewcam360: June 2021

Wednesday, June 30, 2021

Razer Blade 14 Review: Made for Gamers, Great for Creators

The Razer Blade 14 released just a few short weeks ago is aimed squarely at gamers. The headline on the Razer website is “the world’s most powerful 14-inch gaming laptop.” But don’t be fooled by the glowing green logo and the RGB-backlit keyboard: with its AMD CPU, NVIDIA GPU, and color-accurate QHD display, the Blade 14 is an ideal choice for photo and video editors who are looking for a PC that’s portable and powerful.

Many factors came together to make a laptop like the Razer Blade 14 possible in the first place. Just a few years ago, this much power in a chassis this thin and light would have been impossible without serious thermal throttling or some crazy cooling solution. Razer kept the crazy cooling solution, but thanks to AMD, there’s less worry about thermals.

The Blade 14’s claim to fame is that it’s Razer’s first laptop to feature an AMD Ryzen CPU: the unlocked 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 9 5900HX with a base clock of 3.3GHz and a maximum boost clock of 4.6GHz. Thanks to AMD’s 7nm Zen 3 architecture, the 5900HX can deliver all of this performance while consuming less power and therefore generating less heat than the Intel Core chips that Razer has traditionally relied on.

The more efficient CPU, combined with a vapor chamber cooling solution, has enabled Razer to spec this machine with a lot more power than you could previously run inside a 14-inch chassis that’s also extremely thin. The Blade 14 comes in three flavors depending on your preferred GPU, display, and budget, but all of them manage to cram in the 5900HX, 16GB of RAM, and 1TB of fast SSD storage:

The variant we’re testing in this review is the “midrange” $2,200 model with the QHD display and RTX 3070 graphics card, and honestly, that’s probably the version I would recommend to most creators. The downgrade to the RTX 3060 probably wouldn’t hurt photo editing performance very much, but the 3060 variant is limited to a Full HD display with “up to” 100% sRGB, so it’s a no-go for many creatives.

Design and Build

No matter which variant you buy, you won’t be disappointed by the build quality of this laptop.

The Bade 14 lives up to Razer’s reputation for crafting some of the sturdiest and sleekest laptops on the market. Every detail is top-shelf: from the rigid aluminum chassis, to high refresh rate QHD display, to the port selection, to the responsive low-profile keyboard and the ultra-smooth glass trackpad that rivals, nay, exceeds the high bar set by Apple in the MacBook Pro.

Admittedly, Razer’s gaming DNA does (literally) shine through on a few details. The backlit keyboard with per-key RGB lighting and the single color option — Razer’s trademark matte-black-with-glowing-green-logo — are high quality, but a bit of a letdown if you want to give off “clean-cut professional” vibes. I’d have loved to see a silver version like the Razer Blade Studio, especially since the matte-black finish is a horrendous fingerprint magnet. But I’ll forgive the focus on flare because there’s plenty of substance under the surface.

Most obvious from a daily use standpoint are the screen quality and the robust battery life.

Going in, I was worried about the color accuracy of a high-refresh-rate screen designed for gaming, but the 165Hz QHD display on the Blade 14 performed admirably in our tests. We profiled the display using an i1Display Pro Plus through DisplayCAL and found that it lived up to the (somewhat hedged) promise of “up to” 100 percent DCI-P3, covering 96.7 percent of the cinema color gamut. It was also able to hit a respectable 83.5 percent AdobeRGB, a max brightness of 350 nits, and it did it all with a maximum Delta E of less than two in our extended color patch test.

It’s good, but admittedly not on par with the excellent 4K OLED display available in the Blade 15 models. Additionally, I had to keep the display at 100% brightness during photo editing sessions, as white balance shifted noticeably with dimming. But for a 165Hz display in a 14-inch gaming laptop, it’s more than good enough for color-critical work.

Blade 14 color gamut (colored outline) overlaid on the DCI-P3 gamut (dashed gray line)

The (relatively small) 61.6WHr battery also surprised me. Thanks in part to the more efficient AMD CPU, I could stay unplugged for six hours during a regular day’s work. If tasks got a bit heavier and I wanted to take full advantage of the CPU/GPU combo I usually plugged in, as battery life would plummet to about two hours under heavy load, but that’s to be expected when you’re running such powerful hardware and a high refresh rate display.

This is the first PC laptop I’ve used that properly competes with Apple’s Intel-based MacBook Pros when it comes to battery life without sacrificing performance, especially if I took the refresh rate down to 60Hz in the display settings. It can’t match the ultra-efficient M1 MacBook Pro with its insane battery performance, but if you want an Apple laptop with a discrete GPU there isn’t an M1 option anyway — you’re stuck with the much larger 16-inch until Apple releases the rumored M1X.

Finally, in terms of input options, the tiny laptop has a surprising number of ports. There is no SD card slot (*shakes fist at the heavens*) but you get two USB-A 3.2 Gen 2 ports, two USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports (not Thunderbolt) with power delivery and DisplayPort 1.4 protocol, an HDMI 2.1 port, and a 3.1mm headphone and mic combo port. It is a very solid complement of ports for a device this small.

All in all, I’m confident in saying that the Blade 14 is the best-built 14-inch laptop on the market. Razer gets a lot of flack for making such expensive laptops — you can usually get similar specs for a bit less if you go with a brand like ASUS or MSI — but the devil is in the details. Details like a great keyboard, a great trackpad, a premium display, and a rock-solid chassis.

It’s these details that make a laptop a joy (or a pain) to use, and Razer continues to set the bar for premium PC laptops.

Photo Editing Performance

When it comes to performance on our Lightroom, Photoshop, and (new) Capture One benchmarks, the Blade 14 excels in some tasks and falls short of our hopes in others. We’ll get into “why” in a second, but first, let’s just look at the raw numbers.

As always, every benchmark was run with the laptop plugged in and fully charged, with the power settings configured to the most aggressive performance mode. Apps were configured to take full advantage of GPU acceleration where available, and all of the times in the charts below are the average of at least three consecutive runs (“at least three” because, if there’s a weird outlier, we throw it out and run the test again right away).

For today’s comparison, we tested the Razer Blade 14 against an M1 iMac (times should be nearly identical to an M1 MacBook Pro), an Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Pro, and a 2021 ASUS G14 that boasts similar specs to the Blade 14 with a slightly downgraded CPU and GPU, a lower resolution screen, and lower price of $1,500.

You can see the specs of our test machines below:

In Lightroom Classic, we ran our usual import/export tests. 110 Sony Alpha 7R IV and 150 PhaseOne XF raw files were imported with 1:1 previews, heavily edited using some custom-built presets, and then exported twice: once as 100% JPEGs (sRGB) and once as 16-bit uncompressed TIFFs (AdobeRGB).

As you can see, in Lightroom, the M1 still reigns supreme:

We then ran these same import/export tests in Capture One 21. The only difference is that C1 has no 1:1 preview setting, so previews were rendered at the default resolution of 2560 pixels on each machine.

In theory, this should speed up preview generation and slow down export times compared to Lightroom Classic, but as you can see, Capture One is actually faster at both tasks. Unlike Lightroom, C1 can actually take advantage of the NVIDIA GPU inside the Blade 14 and ASUS G14. That translates into much faster export times, despite applying identical edits in both programs.

Note: The import times for the Intel MacBook Pro are not a typo — for whatever reason, the 13-inch MBP was much faster at importing the 150 PhaseOne XF files than the 110 Sony Alpha 7R IV files.

Finally, for Photoshop, we ran the beta version 0.8 of Puget Systems‘ excellent PugetBench benchmark. We use this version because it was the last variant to include the Photo Merge test, and we’ve been using it since the beginning of our laptop testing. This allows us to compare scores across a wide range of machines if we so desire.

Keep in mind that the “GPU” score is based on the average speed of five different tasks: Rotate, Smart Sharpen, Field Blur, Tilt-Shift Blur, and Iris Blur. These are tools and filters that benefit most from GPU acceleration, but they still rely heavily on CPU performance, which is why the M1 is able to keep up despite having no discrete GPU.

The Blade 14 does very well in both Photoshop and Capture One 21, consistently clocking the best times in C1. And yet, this same computer loses (badly) to both the M1 iMac and the Intel MacBook Pro across all import and export tasks in Lightroom Classic. The question is “why?” and the answer is pretty straightforward: RAM.

As far as we can tell, import and export times in Lightroom Classic are based on three factors: CPU performance, the amount of RAM, and the speed of that RAM, with the speed of the RAM playing a much more important role than most people realize.

The Intel-based MacBook Pro we use for testing is my personal machine, which has 32GB of very fast 3733MHz LPDDR4X, giving it a leg up over the Blade in terms of both RAM speed and RAM amount. Meanwhile, the M1 Mac computers only feature 16GB of RAM, but it’s blazing fast “unified” memory that “dramatically improves performance and power efficiency” according to Apple’s own documentation. You can learn more about the technical details of Unified Memory Architecture (UMA) in this great article on How to Geek, but basically, it allows the CPU to access system memory much faster than the RAM you’ll find in most computers.

The takeaway for Lightroom Classic users is this: a fast CPU isn’t enough. You need fast RAM and, ideally, lots of it.

This is the Blade 14’s Achilles heel, because the RAM cannot be upgraded. You are limited to the 16GB of DDR4-3200MHz that Razer soldered to the motherboard, and that’s going to be a deal-breaker for performance fiends who are mainly working in programs that either can’t or won’t take better advantage of the GPU.

Portable, Powerful, Premium

If you’re looking for an ultra-portable PC for photo and video editing, it doesn’t get any better than the Razer Blade 14. Not only does the laptop maintain Razer’s gold standard for build quality and refined design, but it does it while packing in a more powerful CPU and GPU than any other laptop in its class, alongside a color-accurate, high-refresh-rate display that can transition seamlessly from gaming to creative work.

This is a proper MacBook killer if you’re using programs like Capture One that can take advantage of that GPU to speed up your workflow.

The only place where the laptop falls flat is the RAM limitation. Shipping it with 16GB is one thing, and preventing users from upgrading to 32GB –whether it’s because of a limitation on the thermal design or a trade-off Razer made in order to achieve such a thin chassis –is going to be a deal-breaker for people working with lots of large RAW files.

Pros

Most powerful CPU and GPU in any laptop this size
165Hz QHD display with solid color accuracy
Premium build quality
Excellent keyboard and trackpad
Great battery life
Upgradable M.2 storage

Cons

Stuck with 16GB of RAM
No 4K option for resolution fiends
Matte-black finish is a fingerprint nightmare
Premium build = premium price

Every time Razer releases a top-tier laptop, PC buyers have to ask themselves a question: is a premium laptop worth the premium price? With Apple, there’s no choice. If you want MacOS, you pretty much have to pay whatever Apple is asking. But PC users have a plethora of choices, often with similar or identical specs, at a variety of price options that fluctuate based on the build quality and other design elements that are included or left out.

For me, the answer is almost always yes. If I’m going to be working on a laptop day-in and day-out, I’d rather spend more on a machine that’s been designed to delight and built to last. Razer always nails it on those two points, and the Blade 14 is no exception.

The fact that the Blade 14 comes with a slightly faster CPU and slightly faster GPU than competitors like the ASUS G14 is of no consequence to me. We’re talking about saving seconds, not minutes, in popular photo and video editing applications. What wins me over is the trifecta of portability, power, and premium design — a category that the Razer Blade 14 has all to itself as far as I’m concerned.

Are There Alternatives?

If you’re committed to using Windows the main competition is the 2021 ASUS Zephyrus G14, which has a toned-down Ryzen 9 5900HS (not the HX) and a lower-wattage NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU with only 6GB of VRAM. However, it can still be configured with a QHD display that claims 100% DCI-P3 coverage, and ASUS lets you upgrade to 32GB of DDR4-3200MHz RAM, which is a huge plus for creative work.

All of this, including the extra RAM, comes in at $2,000 — that’s $200 less than the Blade 14 variant we were testing with the RTX 3070.

If you’re willing to switch to macOS, there’s just no getting around it: Apple’s M1 chip is shockingly good at both photo and video editing. Even without a discrete GPU, you can expect better performance from a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro in many editing tasks, and it’ll cost you less: the 8-core CPU/8-core GPU variant with 16GB of unified memory and 1TB of storage is “only” $1,900.

Should You Buy It?

I’d venture to guess that most people reading this review are not considering a Mac, in which case, the answer is yes. At this size and weight, there is simply no other laptop that can compete with the Razer Blade 14 on both performance and build quality.

With more RAM, the ASUS G14 will undoubtedly outperform the Blade in most Lightroom import and export tasks, as well as in Photoshop, but you have to be willing to give up the premium design and build quality that makes the Razer Blade lineup stand out. I, for one, am not willing to make that trade just to save a couple of hundred bucks.

The fact that it earns me a slightly faster CPU and slightly beefier GPU in the bargain… that’s just a bonus.

Analysis of Global Photo Gallery Shows ‘Unmistakable Commonalities’

Earlier this year, Adobe partnered with a group of photographers to solicit a series of photos from the global photography community. An analysis shows what Adobe calls “unmistakable commonalities” in the moments that make up everyday lives, regardless of location.

The project, called Life Reflected, was put together to combat the sense that news and media were pushing the idea that there is more differences between people than commonalities. Adobe launched a photo collaboration with New York Times photographer Andre D. Wagner along with Valheria Rocha, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, and James Anthony in the hope that the submissions would prove otherwise. It asked photographers to submit photos based on a series of one-word themes (such as love, childhood, culture, and joy). Adobe then analyzed each for similarities.

“Our hope was that in these submissions we would find the common threads of our shared humanity that connected us no matter where or who we are,” Lex van den Berghe, a Principal Product Manager at Adobe’s writes. “And that’s exactly what happened.”

The campaign received over 2,000 photos from over 50 countries across six continents.

“We found that our inspiration and growth come from the people around us every day — and notably, from the women in our lives. Women represented the single largest share of subject matter for both #InspirationReflected (37 percent) and #GrowthReflected (52 percent),” van den Berghe says.

Despite the purveying theme of technology in daily life, Adobe found that in the photos that depicted “childhood,” more than two-thirds of showed no technology at all. 88 percent of photos that asked for submissions for “joy” took place outside, and 52 percent of all photos showed people, which Adobe says demonstrates how people are important to one another.

“Above all else, our desire and appreciation for human connection was clear: 52 percent of all photo subjects were people, demonstrating our importance to one another, and 89 percent of the photos showing emotion reflected moments of joy, love, and kindness,” van den Berghe continues.

While some of the percentages were less significant, others — like 100 percent of photos that depicted friendship contained at least one person, with women shown more often then men, and how 68-percent of photos of “home” showed not the walls of a building, but “home in nature — clearly show how people around the world share similar ideas of what visually constitutes certain emotions regardless of location or culture.

A greater breakdown of Adobe’s Life Reflected results can be found on its blog here.

Google Wing Launches Free App to Help Drone Pilots Follow Rules

Wing, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has launched a free app in the United States called OpenSky that is designed to help pilots fly their drones legally.

As reported by The Verge, the app initially launched in Australia in 2019 but is now available for both commercial and recreational pilots in the United Staates on both iOS and Android.

According to DroneLife, Wing leverages Google Maps and uses color-coded areas to show where pilots can and cannot fly. Green areas are considered safe to fly, but pilots will have to be cautious in yellow areas (permits may be required, or potential height and public area restrictions in place), and should not fly in red areas at all.

The app also provides pilots the ability to request to fly in restricted areas and receive “near real-time authorizations,” with an approval process to work in airspace that supports Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC).

The OpenSky app will also let pilots log and plan their flight paths in advance and allows the ability to apply for early approvals to fly in sensitive areas. The Wing team notes that users who do this should take screenshots of the flight approval in case they end up in an area with poor reception and have to provide proof for any rangers, controllers, or law enforcement present.

Currently, any drone pilot in the United States has to register to fly with the FAA to fly a drone weighing over 0.55 pounds, and from 2023 forward, drones in the air will have to be able to broadcast their locations during flight. Given the increased regulations being placed on drones and UAVs, an app that is readily available for users around the world, showing them easily where they can fly, and an easy path to get permission for restricted areas is a more than welcome addition to the list of tools for pilots.

The OpenSky app will make it easier for pilots to obey the rules and fly any of the nearly two million drones currently registered in the United States.

“Compliance will ultimately expand the uses and benefits of drones — among them emergency response, commercial inspections, and contactless delivery—to more people,” Wing has says on its blog.

Wing’s OpenSky app can be downloaded both on iOS and Android.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.

Shimoda Launches New Travel Backpacks Designed for Carry-On

Shimoda, a bag brand within the Mac Group, has launched a new crowdfunding campaign for its Explore Series v2 backpacks. Billed as the perfect bag for travel, adventure, and landscape photographers, the upgraded packs have several new features over their predecessors.

The Explore Series v2 is available in three sizes: 25L, 30L, and 35L sizes. Shimoda’s founder and lead designer Ian Millar says that these were designed as a direct response to those who wanted the Shimoda design and functionality but wanted smaller bags that were carry-on friendly. The Explore 35 v2 (E35) will supposedly be qualified for those who fly in the United States in “premium seating options,” the Explore 30 v2 (E30) is sized for stricter European Union guidelines, and the Explore 25 v2 (E25) is compact enough that Shimoda claims it will travel almost anywhere and easily fit under an airline seat.

Shimoda Explore v2 camera bags are constructed with abrasion-resistant and water repellent, carbonate-coated ripstop nylon — the same durable material from Shimoda’s robust Action X line. The company has improved the material by infusing the Carbonate-Resin with its chosen color pigment which it says results in a softer, more subtle appearance that has greater resistance to color fading.

Aside from the improved compactness, the new Explore v2 offers a set of enhancements. Firstly, it has what Shimoda calls a new “aired-out harness,” which combines plush air-mesh with ventilated EVA cushioning which supposedly allows air to circulate through the rear panel, shoulder strap, and belt. Shimoda claims this allows the wearer to stay cooler in crowded, non-airconditioned areas.

For content creators, Shimoda built in a wireless lavalier microphone attachment point on each shoulder strap, and the side handle (which has also been redesigned) can now be used as a luggage handle pass-through to allow it to mount on top of a roller bag.

The interior also features a few new adjustments, like dedicated padded filter pockets designed to fit 100mm filters, a hidden passport pocket, and a dual access document pocket for books, maps, and camera accessories that need to be accessed quickly.

All of these enhancements are in addition to the features that made Shimoda popular with adventure photographers before, like a height-adjustable harness, modular core system, integrated lightweight frame, removable belt, padded laptop sleeve, leather zipper pulls, and rear or side camera access.

Speaking of the modular core system, Shimoda is also introducing two new core sizes, adding to the previous six for a total of eight that fit into any of the Shimoda family of bags.

Shimoda backpacks tended to be quite large and may have been seen as “overkill” for travel by air, and the choice to redesign the Explore Series in these v2 backpacks appears to be a direct answer to that.

The Explore v2 series can be backed starting at $215 — for backpack shells without modular cubes — and range as high as $300 for large kits in various configurations. All backing options can be seen on the company’s Kickstarter page here.

Disclaimer: Make sure you do your own research into any crowdfunding project you’re considering backing. While we aim to only share legitimate and trustworthy campaigns, there’s always a real chance that you can lose your money when backing any crowdfunded project.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Photographers

Be it for the best chili recipes or the best photographers, people frequently start their web browsing journey with a Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo search. So, if you’re a photographer and you want those search engines to find your website, you need to optimize it for those search engines.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, but the term is used more broadly to describe how a site presents itself to search engines. Search engines look for information on the web that matches the search terms and returns a list of links that match up with those terms. Imagine searching through a Word document, but in this instance, the whole internet is the Word document.

The hardest part of what search engines do is ranking that information. Of the millions of possible search results for a set of terms, which ones should the search engine return and in what order? When you type in “best chili recipes,” which one should come up first?

To figure this out, search engines use sophisticated algorithms to calculate how useful a particular web page is likely to be for that visitor. To put it differently, the returned search results are an estimate of how likely the specific links are what you seek. The process of adjusting your site to match up with these algorithms is called search engine optimization, or SEO.

Universal SEO Techniques

In what follows, we will review a few tried-and-true SEO techniques that work for all types of websites that will be just as applicable to us.

Get Analyzed

Setup Google Analytics (GA) on your website so you can see the effects of your SEO. This should be mandatory for anyone with a website; without it, you won’t be able to figure out if what you’re doing is working at all. Although platforms like SquareSpace and Photofolio provide some stats, you want your data to go with you, wherever your site goes. GA will do that. And it’s free!

You can also sign up for Google’s Search Console to get access to more detailed information.

Do your Research

Try to imagine what keywords prospective visitors will use when looking for your website. You’ll want to include those keywords in the optimizations below. Imagine yourself as an art buyer looking for photographers — what search terms would you use? Figure out what kind of keywords your competitors are using and what keywords are most popular for photography businesses in your specialty, and pick the one that you think you can compete on.

Don’t know which keywords to use? Google is here to help.

Ride the Long Tail

As tempting as it can be, don’t try to compete for headline search terms like “best photographer.” These generic, super-common search terms, called head terms, are going to be nigh-impossible to rank for, and the same goes for any other search that returns huge brand names or famous people. A much better use of your time is to focus on terms that include unique factors, like your location and specialty, where there’s less competition. This is what’s called a long tail keyword.

Keep in mind, these are also the terms that serious art buyers are going to use. They don’t want someone else’s idea of the so-called “best photographer.” They want to find a list of potential photographers who cover their required specialty and location. This is described as “intention” in the SEO world. The more specific a search term, the more likely a user is to take action on that search term.

Make Use of Your Website’s “Meta Tags”

These tags contain text that isn’t visible to visitors but can be seen by the search engine’s robots. This text will likely be displayed as a description of your site on Google’s SERPs, allowing potential visitors to get a sense of what they’re in for. Well-written meta text can go a long way to improving your click-through rate, and in turn, your search result ranking. Keep it concise — no longer than a tweet (140 characters).

Title Your Pages Carefully

Make sure that the title of your website describes who you are and what you do while including your selected keywords. Lead with your primary keywords, and put your (business) name at the end. For a food photographer, an example title might be:

Food & Beverage Photography | Joe Weaver Photography

Above all, keep your site title concise and accurate. Google doesn’t display web page titles beyond about 55 characters.

Wonderful Machine member photographer Inti St. Clair has some great title text. Browser tabs will always truncate title text, but the full version reads “Inti St. Clair | Lifestyle | Healthcare | Travel | Portrait Photography.” Our own Bill Cramer uses “Philadelphia Environmental Portrait Photographer, Bill Cramer” which is also great. Both contain the name and specialty.

Maintain a Blog and Update it Frequently

This is a rich source of keywords for search engines, and the SEO benefits your blog provides will be automatically correlated with your main website (provided both exist at the same domain, that is). While writing is not any photographer’s preferred medium for expression, a successful web marketing strategy will require a blog. See more about this in our article about building your web presence, and get some writing tips for creatives who hate writing.

Get a Word in Edgewise

There are a bunch of hidden places you can squeeze in text. For example, you can use your page titles, gallery titles, link titles/anchor text, page URLs, and image file names to get some text into your site. You may or may not have control over some of this information, but if you can control it, make good use of it. Use human-readable syntax and include keywords when appropriate.

Use Your “About” Page Effectively

Where you do have the opportunity to have user-readable text, like your about page, make the most of it. Our food photographer in Minnesota might write the following as the first sentence of his about page:

Alex is a food photographer based in Minnesota with three decades of experience working with corporate and agency clients to create advertising photography in Minnesota and throughout the Midwest.

Stay Social

As a photographer, you should be cultivating your social media audience. This is invaluable for SEO purposes. While having widely shared Facebook and Twitter posts may or may not directly affect your search results, the visitors that your social media channels drive to your website will help increase your search ranking organically. Even if you bring a social media user to your Facebook page via an ad, any links they click on while on your page are organic. Furthermore, it’s not unheard of for creatives to find and hire photographers through Facebook and Instagram. Don’t spend all your time on this, but don’t ignore it.

Just Make Good Stuff

By and far, the most important factor to your website’s success is high-quality content. While all the tips and tricks we’re recommending are valuable, they won’t do nearly as much for you as excellent content. Make sure your site is easy to navigate, shows awesome images that are relevant to your specialty, and clearly indicates who you are as a photographer.

Potential (Search Engine) Pitfalls and Problems

Stay Fresh

SEO changes as rapidly as the internet, so the techniques that were all the rage in 2013 might be worthless today — or even damaging. As search engines fine-tune their results, they’ll shift from using one metric to another, and to maintain your ranking you’ll need to keep up. Unfortunately, you can’t just optimize once and leave it forever. Revisit the process yearly, if possible.

Wear the White Hat

Search engines now penalize sites that implement so-called “black hat” SEO techniques. This means that if you try to stuff a bunch of keywords into your HTML, inaccurately describe your site in your meta or title tags, spam blog comments, hide invisible or tiny text on your site, or any of the other recognized other bad practices, you’ll lose rank in the search engine results pages.

Practice Patience

You’re not going to see results right away. This is a four-to-six-month process at a minimum. But keep an eye on your analytics — if you’re doing it right, you’ll see a slow but steady rise in the number of visitors to your website.

Put Away Your Magic Wand

None of these techniques, taken alone, is going to dramatically improve your search engine ranking. Consider each a small step in the right direction, cumulatively and progressively leading to better results over time.

Take the Broad View

While we’ve focused on general site optimization, that isn’t the whole picture. There’s a whole world of search marketing techniques beyond this, but correctly implementing the above steps is going to be important to any subsequent marketing strategy.

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