www.diyara.com

Okay so now we know content is king. And of course since we are creating our own blogs, (remember blogs is short slang for Weblogs - which is what their “formal and official” name is), most of our information is going to be “unique” and “Original”. Yet every now and then, since we are only human, and since we simply cannot “create” more and more information, we will copy information from other web sites. That is cool. There is no problem with that, UNLESS, you decide that “copying” and/or “linking” is simply better and forego writing anything.

Now let me make this clear. If you are offering a service to people, where your main business is to offer out links to other places where people can get information, in other words you are a repository where people come to get links, because you already did all the research - that is fine. Because what you will loose in content, you will make up in “eyeballs” and “hits”. Remember the end result of good search engine listings is just that. MORE HITS - MORE EYEBALLS - MORE PEOPLE VISITING. And content is not the only parameter an Search Engine looks at. Not by a long shot.

This is a critical point to keep in mind. Everything we will talk about, every method, from content to email to lists to whatever, (hehe my most unfavorite word in the English language pops in - Whatever - see my post on that word in my blog), has but one goal in mind. To consistently and constantly increase and build your website “hits”. To make sure you have an ever-growing “fan” club “motivated” because of the service you are offering, to come back. So please differentiate between the end goal and the methods. Content (discussed in our first article) is a method towards the goal of getting listed in a good position on a search engine, and the goal is to have people use and come to your web site or blog, and create a “buzz” about it. (We will talk about this much later in our series.)

Let us go back to content for a moment. Here we are talking about something that all writers know about and are familiar with. Text, words, phrases. Original, unique text.

So in order to continue on our own fairly logical path, we will now concentrate on the “text” and what has to be in it. Which brings us to the subject of “keywords“. Before explaining just what these are and either their importance or total invalidity and worthlessness these days, (and this is up for debate) let us define keywords more carefully.

If you have a website selling hair beauty aids, you will want to sell your material writing content around what you are selling. Obviously if you write something about the difference between different models of dishwashers, this is not going to relate to the “subject matter” and content of your site. So you will write articles around your hair supplies. You will write articles on good hair care, on how to dye your hair, how to get rid of split-ends, how often to shampoo etc. etc.

Our magic hair website is called “Hair Is Not Forever”, and it is at www.hairisnotforever.com (I have no clue if such a site exists so please don’t try that link!) But this is our site for now and we will keep it as we go along. hairisnotforever also has a blog. This blog we will call “SilkyFairHair” and we will put it, for the sake of our example in blogger.com under the name of the proprietor who is aptly named Mr. Nor Hair. So now we have as follows:

1. Web Site - Hair Forever @ www.hairisnotforever.com (this URL is fictional)

2. Blog - SilkyFairHair @ http://norhair.bl.com (this URL is fictional)

These names ARE important and so are the URL’s. (URL stands for Universal Resource Locater). So keep them in mind as we go along through these articles especially when I get to the article on the importance of finding the right name.

So Mr. Nor Hair and his wife, Mrs. Purple Hair work together. They create the site, get all the necessary stuff to sell something on it, write a couple of articles about hair and sit back and wait for the people to come beating their “virtual” door down. Well as we say in Hebrew, “Boker Tov” (which literally means “Good Morning”), or as you say in English, “Knock. Knock. Good Morning! Anyone Home?”

Okay the Hair couple know about keywords. So they create articles in which EVERY sentence has the word hair in it (or balding). But hair is the name of the game. They make sure their content is original, and once they have written two HTML pages of hair articles, strategically placed by their cousin the graphic artist (who is bald) around the advertisements for hair products and now they think they are done!

Woah! Not by a LONG SHOT! And here is where it gets depressing for the uninitiated and non-dedicated people.

Let us deal with the “keyword” issue.
Keywords are like indices or if you wish, categories. A keyword is something that the search engine will look for and validate (in our day), to use as one of the parameters as to how to list your site.

The keywords we refer to are in two distinct and totally different places. The first in the page header of the site.
in what is known as the section for “meta” tags. We will deal with meta tags in a different article, however let us just say these are the keywords most search engine look for (with their “bots”) when visiting your site.
An example meta tag for keywords on our site may look like this:

< BLOCKQUOTE>< META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="hair, hair products, hair grooming, baldness, going bald, shampoo, conditioner, hair color, dying hair, split-ends, split ends, hair life, beautiful hair, luxurious hair">

Again in our article(s) on meta tags we will discuss these keywords, and meta tags, but for now take it as a given these are some of the keywords that will be in the meta tag.

When the Search Engine technology first became popular and meta tags were implemented, the keywords tag was critical. Search Engines looked at the keywords in the meta tag and assumed that was what the site was about and listed the site under those keywords. This was caught on to immediately, and humans being the crafty devils they are, began listing keywords that had nothing to do with their sites in order to drive traffic to the site. (Remember - the end result is the oh-so-important one: Hits & Eyeballs)

So porn sites especially, adopting this as yet another “fool the engine” technique, would put keywords like “hair”, “technology” etc. into their meta tags, and give the site an innocuous name and voila, more traffic.

So in the never-ending battle Search Engines caught on, and did a few things. They deprecated the importance of the keywords in the meta tags according to their algorithms, UNLESS the content on the site actually did match the keywords. Of course, this was not enough as porn sites will put “real” content around their stuff. I will give you a REAL example which I find funny, but it is very serious.

In one of my posts on my blog, you can see my bio which is picked up by search engines. The other day I received an email from an old flame of mine saying “I freaked out. I googled you, under Ted Gross Writer, and you are connected with a site about tushy’s!” So I go and Google it, and sure enough in like the fifth position is this: “Ted Gross’s Unofficial Bio - The Real Version by Tushy” and of course I click and get led to another site (no url here as I do not want to publicize that site for obvious reasons) and I come to a porn site which ripped off, out of all the content on the internet, MY profile to place around their porn adverts. UGH! But you see that is how crafty people are!

(Here we are not going to talk about “splogs” - meaning “spam blogs” yet. But keep it in mind.)

Okay now what happens - not in theory but in practice.

Two scenarios:

1. You have keywords in your meta tag (and you should have them!) The little Search Engine “bot” (that is a software program whose job it is to travel around the Internet, never sleeps and never eats and gets into all those porn sites too!, and picks up information on ALL sites so the information can be categorized), comes to our site of hairisnotforever and reads the keywords on the page. Then this little bot makes a snapshot of the web page. Then the algorithms take over and match the keywords in the meta tags to the text and stuff on your site. (Remember Search Engines don’t “see”, they are NOT visual (males are visually oriented not Search Engines!) so graphics are not taken into account unless you use the alt tag.) The algorithms get more and more sophisticated as time goes on and they look for content, keywords, phrases etc. (Remember original content!)

2. You have no keywords in your meta tag so the engine just looks at your content.

So our happy couple figures okay lets put the word hair say, in every sentence at least three times. NO! Don’t do that. Overuse of a keyword is a red-flag to a Search Engine and you will be penalized for it! It should be used and used frequently, but NOT overused.

Now when you Google for hair products using the word “balding”, the Search Engine has the keyword, and based upon a million parameters decides what position for that specific keyword, hairisnotforever will have, and feeds it out.

So our couple figures what the hell. We will also sell mascara, and they put in a picture advert and the word mascara in their keywords, without having any content for it. Well then www.hairisnotforever.com will probably be listed as the last of the last of the last for anyone looking for “mascara”.
So for this lesson the formula is:

“Content+Keywords in the content+Keywords in Meta tag.”

Copyright 2006 Ted W. Gross. All rights reserved. (You may publish this article in its entirety with the following author’s information with live links only.)
Ted W. Gross’s very popular blog, Cobwebs Of The Mind contains daily updated posts and articles on technology and writing. He also owns Amor Enterprises which maintains Virgin Earth Article Submissions which is designed to accept articles about any country or place in the world. Ted Gross is also a published author and maintains a web site for his works.

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Since we are on the subject of linking to and from your blogs, and ostensibly this whole series was started with the discussion on links on our minds, (due to the discussion about Technorati rankings), it is not far-fetched to now devote an article or two on the effects of linking and bona fide strategies to get more links without being penalized or worse by the Search Engines.

It is necessary to understand that there are certain “linking strategies” which are no longer looked upon kindly by the Search Engines (and even many surfers). On the by-and-by I will mention these “bad” strategies in my articles. However, right now we will just mention the most blatant ones. And we will begin with the negative.

It is often the case that when we are starting out and looking for links, that we consider “link banks” or “link farms”. The ones that particularly a waste of times and money are those that will “for a small fee” charge you money to use them. Here is how they work.

You go into a link-farm and they maintain a database full of customers just like yourself. If they are halfway tech-savvy they will also categorize their links so that you can link to other web-sites that are within your “sphere”. You go to the categories that interest you, and you click on those web-sites that seem to be related in content to yours. The system then sends out an automated email to the webmasters of those sites telling them of your link-exchange request. The webmaster can either approve or decline. This is fairly simple. What is supposed to happen then, is that you and the Webmaster of the chosen site put up “reciprocal links”. You link to them - they link to you. You give them a “hot-link/back-link” to their site they give one to you. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well… First and foremost you have just bled out another link. Okay not so bad, unless you constantly do this. A site with too many “bleeding links” and almost no content is marked as a spam site. One which simply puts links up to other sites, adds the keywords, some junk content and tries to move up in the Search Engine ranking. BTW..this works. It works and works well. For a couple of weeks until the Search Engines get around to actually botting, caching and running their algorithms on your site. Then you are penalized or simply thrown to the back of the line.

But there is a very cagey thing these link-farms do as well. What they offer you is either free link exchange or for a few bucks more you get the PRO edition. The Pro edition allows you to put all your reciprocal links into a database and whenever someone accesses your site these links are fed out in pages. Lots and lots of people, newbies usually, go for the PRO option. After all for $30 every couple of months, they don’t have to add to their HTML every time a new link is agreed upon. They just add it to the program database which takes care of the rest. The thing is then they are not bleeding links as the information is held on a central server (not on their own servers) and I challenge anyone here who knows of these farms to Google search your link on their site. You just won’t find it. So while you being conservative, and you don’t pay that extra “small” charge, add a link to your HTML every time your request is approved, most of these people are just adding a link ostensibly coming from their site, into a centralized database. They get your link, you get almost NADA. And since there is no overhead for them, they willingly and happily will add thousands of links. Go find YOUR site among those thousands of links in one web site. Who do you know, is going to flip through a few hundred link pages reading every one?

That is just one of the negative aspects. So the rule here is:
“Stay away from commercial link-farms and link-exchanges - they are a NO-NO!”

Okay so how do you get “good” and “valid” links into your Blog?

1. Lots of Hard work
2. Technorati as we have already discussed is one way. (No need to repeat - read articles 2 and 3 in this series)


3. Links between friends - this works there is a give and take here, and it spreads. You would be surprised how good this option works. My AW friends do this routinely, and we are all writers. I gladly link to fellow AW sites even if they don’t give me a “reciprocal” link. Cause that is what friends are for and that is the community.


4. Targeted Email - This we will discuss in one of our next articles and I think you will be surprised as to how well this works. For now let me say these few things about Email - Targeted Email.
   A) I own quite a few web sites and deal with blogs. I can tell you that based upon real-time statistics if a targeted email to a targeted audience goes out, the hits on the site I am targeting, jump in the hundreds of percents within the next 24 hour period. People who WANT email will read it.
   B) How do you get a targeted email list? First off you must spread the word. Forums, article submission sites (a very good option), friends, family, the stunning woman next door who you were always to shy to talk to, (hey don’t laugh I am SHY!), Internet buddies. Remember you are starting from scratch here. You are new to this whole world, its lingo, its etiquette and its rules. Take anything you can get and keep it and treasure it as if it were gold.
   C) NEVER THROW AWAY AN EMAIL ADDRESS.
   D) NEVER SELL YOUR LIST OR LET SOMEONE ELSE BORROW IT. AND GUARANTEE THAT TO YOUR READERS AS WELL!
   E) Targeted Email lists take time and effort but they are your best option. Your BEST option for new sites.


5. Implementing RSS feeds - we will discuss these later (but if you are impatient you can read my series of RSS articles here at EzineArticles, just click on here or on my Name to see my articles on RSS.)


6. Word of Mouth - if it spreads it works… PERIOD (No email no nothing. Just BUZZ. Create the buzz. You must market your own site, cause if you don’t no one is going to come to it!) This is a lot like writing and having your first book published. Once it is published, the real work begins. You have to market the book. Sell it. Autograph it. Talk about it. Until you are nauseated from it and wish you never learned how to write. But you have to do it!


7. Offer something that is WORTHWHILE for your audience - and make sure you update it constantly and consistently. Take my blog for example. I made it generic. BUT I wanted to get out some thoughts on writing and living etc. And I do that and continue to do that. However, my background gives me some fairly good expertise in a few other areas as well. This is also great practice in writing. So I combine that expertise with my writing.. and voila. Don’t only write about some events in your life. As much as that is important to you, very few people will want to read it. Give people knowledge, something they want something that ONLY you can give them. And be damn good at what you do. On one hand the famed phrase goes from P. T. Barnum: “A sucker is born every minute” on the other hand “Never underestimate the intelligence of your audience”. Most people are a hell of a lot smarter and more intuitive than we give them credit for.


8. Work hard on Good Search Engine listing and ranking
   Use the options, tools and ideas you read here and elsewhere. Pick and choose what is good and works for you. Don’t discount anything, until you tried it. Works, that is great. Don’t work - dump it like a rotten tomato.


9. Advertise with Google Ad Sense and Yahoo (Overture)
   One of the few times I will actually suggest spending money. But be careful and wary. Keep close track on what works and what does not work. Follow your budget closely. Change your adverts to meet demand and what works and what does not work. Use catch phrases - be savvy. People come to the site - deliver on your advert. You have less than 5 seconds to get their attention. Use those 5 seconds to the maximum!


10. Offering Freebies - Sometimes this works sometimes it is just garbage. Depends on your site and what you are selling or offering. E-Books are almost passe, I would not go that route. I know an incredible amount of people, and I have yet to meet one person, who has told me they actually read those free e-books which are basically personal blogs in PDF format. Most of them are simply snares and pitches, full of the worst writing and junk imaginable. They tell you how to get rich in 10 minutes or how to make a million bucks on the net - if only you send them another $100 bucks for their secret! Like I said before “a sucker is born every minute!” However e-books on health, herbal remedies etc. are all the rage. They offer INFORMATION or KNOWLEDGE. You may want to consider those if they fit into your site’s content and genre.


11. An Incredible Amount of Patience - Be patient. You dont gain 1000 links to your site in a week!


12. More Hard work - need I say more?

I am sure I left out a few things (or maybe more than a few), which I will get to in the future.

Copyright © 2006 Ted W. Gross. All rights reserved. (You may publish this article in its entirety with the following author’s information with live links only.)
Ted W. Gross’s very popular blog, Cobwebs Of The Mind contains daily updated posts and articles on technology and writing. He also owns Amor Enterprises which maintains Virgin Earth Article Submissions which is designed to accept articles about any country or place in the world. Ted Gross is also a published author and maintains a web site for his works.

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Email - we take it for granted. We use it almost every day. We use it for business, pleasure, fun and work. We use it and abuse it. We say things that are taken the wrong way. We express hate and love, likes and dislikes in our email. We fall in love, fall out of love, send virtual flowers, send postcards, send presents, send protests, send hate mail. We do business and sign contracts on it. We transfer funds with it. We type with it, hate it and love it. We often cannot live without it.

Email is so ingrained in our daily lives, we no longer appreciate its power or possibilities. We use it as if it were an extension of ourselves and actually tend to reveal a lot more about our own minds, hearts and souls then we would ever reveal if we had to sit and write out each and every email with pen and paper. Email is most definitely a powerful tool, if not the most powerful tool in the arsenal of spreading word and popularity about your blog or web-site.

On one other thing about Email. It is FREE. Totally and completely FREE. You don’t even have to an email account with your web account provider. All you need is a few Yahoo or Gmail accounts.

However, there is a BIG caveat here. If you are anything like me, you have come to hate “spam” mail. Garbage mail. Junk mail. Spam email. All of it is crap. All of it steals precious time and clogs up your system. We hate spam. We ignore it. We sift through it to get to our “real” email. And here is the rule of thumb. Email that we want - WE READ.

How do you put email to use for you and your blog and web site?

Well first some things you do NOT do.

• You do not purchase lists off the Internet that are non-targeted lists (even if they are opt-in lists). What is non-targeted? Non-targeted means that you will be sending out millions of emails to people whose inbox and spam box are totally full and crowded with junk as it is. Your email will be between some idiot that is sending out emails promising larger breasts and another offering males a great time in bed with a new and great product combining viagra, cialis and some homespun remedy for a longer, more powerful male organ. Trust me. You do NOT WANT your email stuck there.
• You do not purchase lists off of some fly-by-night company on the Internet, even if they do promise 2.5 million email addresses for $29.99.
• You do not “farm” email addresses off of Internet sites using a program dedicated to this practice.
• You do not offer to purchase or borrow your best friend’s or lovers email address list (in most cases not in all!).

What you can do:

• You create a guest book on your blog or an email opt-in list. You save each and every one of those emails as if they were GOLD. For these things all you need to do is Google for them. Bravenet is one of the largest, most respected and offers an incredible amount of FREE utilities for this purpose. You do not need to be a techie to use this stuff.
• You ask everyone you know (including the grocer and butcher) to get on your list! (NO! I will not get up enough courage to ask that beautiful woman next door for her email address. I can’t even get enough gumption to say “Hello” to her. sheesh…)
• You consistently and constantly put out emails to your membership but you do not badger them. Once a week is really enough, unless you have this incredibly special announcement to make or deal to offer. You ask them to forward these emails as well.
• On your web-site you allow people to decide how often they want an email from you. Blogs do not have this capability and it would be incredibly difficult to build it in without using a third party extension. (Again companies like Bravenet are the answer here.)
• Your email is professional, straightforward, and if possible offered in both HTML and plain text.
• Your email address - the email address where your membership email is coming from - is memorable, even if you are using gmail. I have for instance my own domain email for my stuff, and I use a gmail address for my blog which is the name of my blog. That address is simply cobwebsofthemind which associates in the persons mind with my blog. It is also good advertising and a way for someone to remember your blog even if they forget the url. Which is unique enough for here. On my web sites, for instance it is all xxxxx@mywebsite.com. Then when the recipient wades through tons of email they know immediately your email is something they want and they will read it. So for the Hair blog their address would be something with the word “hair” in it or better yet “silkybeautifulyounghair”!

Why is Email so important?

It is an excellent question, despite the fact that some techies may snicker at such a simple question. The answer is easy, yet can get incredibly complicated. The great thing about email that a person wants is that it gets at least skimmed. It keeps you in touch and lets the person that signed up know that the web-site is active and doing things. The other “more important part” of email is that little “forward” option. If Sally seems something that she may think Jane and Bill want, she is going to forward the email with a couple of clicks. Viral. It gets spread. People get to know about it. NEWS SPREADS. And with email it can spread like wildfire! Do not ever underestimate this. You may send out 100 emails from your site, and on the 101’st for no specific reason you can discern suddenly the hits go up. Suddenly the “word” is spreading. Never give up on the email option.

Don’t overuse it either. Don’t badger. Don’t spam. Don’t do your best friend a favor by sending out emails to your list for them. (I would, of course, send out a 100 emails to my list for a date with the lady next door!) Seriously, your email list is your gold. Your ace in the hole. Don’t abuse it!

Okay lets now discuss Email and some “real” examples:

When someone arrives at a blog, unlike a web site, there is no need to “register” or “sign in”. Thus it is much harder to get an individual to “sign-up” for a feed from your blog or to be on your email list. You have less than 7 seconds (that is not a typo, 7 seconds) to interest the person, which includes loading of your page. So use it well. Remember, OFFER WHAT THEY WANT - NOT WHAT YOU WANT. If you cannot do that than perhaps numbers is not what you need. Just the pleasure of having your own blog.

Send out a thank you IMMEDIATELY. You can use an auto-responder, or lacking that, have a template in your email draft box, and once a day check for new sign-ups and send out a thank you SEPARATELY to each one. No CC’s or BCC’s. Bad, BAD idea.

If you have a web site that requires registration, make sure you send out a thank you automatically. Make sure you explain again what the site is about with your URL at least twice in the page. Make it nice. Make it simple. Make it good. Market yourself and your web site and your product.

When you send out emails to your entire list you have many options. You can make them yourself, or go to a place like Vertical Response which takes all the hard work from you. Vertical Response is good, but not free. There are others in the market, reputable good sites who can help you along. But if you serious about marketing bear this in mind if you email list grows too large or unwieldy.

Whenever I send out an email from any one of my web sites the hits on that web site go up immediately and for the next 24 hours. By the way, it is important to understand, that your email will have a shelf-life of 24 hours on a good day. This means that if the member does not respond, visit, or otherwise act on the email within 24 hours, it probably just won’t happen. Don’t sweat it though. There is always the next email, and the next and the next…

One of the best and free ways to make your blog work for you is to use feedblitz. This takes care of subscribers and RSS feeds. It works for the most part and is good. Use it on your blog.

In summary, Email is a tool that should be used to the maximum but not abused or overused. Used and manipulated correctly it can increase your members and keep those who did sign up coming back. Loyal membership is your key to Viral marketing.

Copyright © 2006 Ted W. Gross. All rights reserved. (You may publish this article in its entirety with the following author’s information with live links only.)
Ted W. Gross’s very popular blog, Cobwebs Of The Mind contains daily updated posts and articles on technology and writing. He also owns Amor Enterprises which maintains Virgin Earth Article Submissions which is designed to accept articles about any country or place in the world. Ted Gross is also a published author and maintains a web site for his works.

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