our Orange county seo company typed this phrase on Google

and here is what i found on the top of the search results

The plan is to grow this list even longer and kick all the other search results to the second page. Many out there thinks that this will effect most business directories and IYP’s. Google understands that the future of search will change and more and more people will go to niche sites to look for what they need. for example if you are looking for a home , you will no longer go to Google but you might go to realtor.com or any other real estate website. The same with business, Google right now misses the niche of major IYP, which the user generated contents with votes and reviews. I believe that Google is trying to be pro active and Kill major IYP’s before they take a piece of the market away from it.

What do you think, i would like to hear your opinion.

Scrum is a completely different way from waterfall in terms of managing your project. In scrum every thing is a time box.

Here is how it works.

1) Backlog

The Back log is a complete list of all the functionalities needed for the project.

It starts with a meeting with the product owner and the rest of your team to identify the functionalities that needs to be executed (backlog) for the project.

As you’ve already noticed, there is no functional spec or any kind of paper work that does not add value to the project owner. The team members are all there because they are going to be self managed from the start. They will create the backlog with the product owner.

After the backlog is created , the Scrum master (aka the project manager) needs to ask the product owner about the most important functionalities that he/she would like to see implemented first. These functionalities will be taken to the top of the backlog. The team members will then identify the amount of functionalities that can be completed in three months. Yes, the team members are the ones who are going to decide that, because no one can measure the work load and the amount it takes better than the people that are going to do the actual work.

2) Sprints

The first three months the work load will be divided into sprints. Each sprint is like a two week to a one month time box. At the end of each sprint, there needs to be some completed functionalities. Completed means documented, tested , checked in CVS or SVN, and it is on the server and could even be shippable. After completing all the sprints for the first 3 month Phase, there will be a meeting with the product owner to show him/her the progress and present a demo of what the functionalities look like.

3 ) Daily Scrum meeting

After getting your first sprint in place, the team members will sit together to divide the work into very small tasks. Each task will be between 4 to 16 hours. The team will decide on the length of time needed, and the due date for each task.

There will be a daily meeting for all the team members involved in the project. This meeting will take about 10 to 15 min depending on the size of the team. There will be 3 questions in that meeting.

1) what did each team member accomplish the previous day

2) what each team member will accomplish today

3) what are the red flags.

If one of the team members is not completed with his/her tasks, the Scrum master should stop the meeting and ask to meet again in an hour when every one is done with their tasks. Done means documented, tested , checked in.

The product owner or the client can be in that meeting every day if he or she chooses to. They can be there in person or on the phone.

This is a complete transparency between the different individuals on the project.

4 ) Retrospective

At the end of each phase, there is the retrospective meeting. In that meeting, the team members will discuss what went right and what went wrong. How can they improve the next sprint and how can they learn from their mistakes in the first phase.

Whatever could not be completed or whatever needs to change from the first phase can be added to the first sprint in the second phase.

5) Management

There are three managers in Scrum

a) the product Owner

b) the scrum master aka the project manager

c) the team members

6) Burn down chart

the burn down chart is a chart between the workload or the tasks of each phase in the y-axes and the time that needs to complete on the x-axes. this will show the team members the velocity and the speed of the work flow, it will also give a clear presentation of weather or not the project can be completed on time.

7) Iteration

Scrum is an iterative methodology. Unlike water fall, you do not have to wait for the design to start the development. All aspects of the project will be worked on at the same time and the team members will be working on it for the whole life cycle of the project.

Here is a graphical representation of the iteration

A great book to read on Scrum is Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber.

Ken is one of the founders of Scrum.

In my next blog I will talk about other Agile methodologies that go hand in hand with Scrum Such as TDD and XP.

In Scrum, the work load is divided into small tasks. Each task is between 4 to 16 hours. Each task will have a due date.
The task hours, division and due date are given by the resource itself . This will create a sense of ownership and accountability for each team member since they are the ones who committed o do the work in a given time and date. There is a 10 to 15 min. daily scrum meeting where the PM meets with the team members to discuss 3 questions.
1) what have we accomplished yesterday
2) what are we going to accomplish today
3) what are the red flags or concerns.

In the daily scrum, Non-productive team members not only fail themselves but they also fail the other team members’ hard work. it is very difficult for any one person to keep failing the rest of the team every day in the scrum meeting.

the red flag question is mentioned to make sure that there is no obstacle to carry out the assigned work.

When one of the team members is not done with the workload from the previous date, the PM stops the scrum and asks to meet again in a couple of hours when all the work is completely done by each and every member.

IF the non-productive team member fails the rest of the team more than once, the PM needs to sit with that team member to find out what the problem is and how he can resolve it. If the problem lies in the person’s skills, then the PM needs to find the best work for this resource. Maybe the work tasks are not best suited and other tasks could be more suited to this person.

In final stages and after trying all different methods to help the team member, if all of the above does not work then the PM should ask to change that resource from the team.

Keep in mind that each team member has a different motivation angle, personality and circumstances and you should treat each individual member accordingly.

Some asked me that they do not see the meta description that they wrote, instead they see different text on the search engine when it comes to some search terms. this is true, what happen is that google first read your meta description. If your description does not include the keywords the user is looking for, Google will choose some text on your site that does include the search terms and displays that instead. what you need to do in order to avoid such a thing is to change your meta description in order to catch most keywords needed to show your description on major search engine.

Title tags is on of the important factors in ranking your site. Google uses over 200 factors to rank your site.

I have tried increasing my title tags to 70 characters and it works. I heard some people saying that it even goes beyond 70 characters and that it even rotates to the second line but I have not confirmed that yet.

Click here to view the embedded video.