blogging 102

Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes One of the biggest reasons people visit websites is to get information. If you can regularly provide fresh, quality content on your website you can expect to be rewarded by visitors and return visitors. What’s more, you will be rewarded by the search engines. I recommended that you add new and original content to your site as often as possible, ideally once a day. Regularly adding fresh and original content: - Keeps your site visitors coming back - Continually adds value to your website - Makes people more comfortable buying from your site - Establishes yourself as an authority in your industry - Greatly helps your site rank higher in search engines All of the above factors translate into revenue. We all know how hard adding original and fresh content is, especially if you’re the business owner. You have to be original, creative, organized, thoughtful and motivated, and above all, able to write. So what’s a website owner or business owner... 

Reading time: 7 – 12 minutes When people refer to “organic SEO” (search engine optimization), they almost always use it as a blanket term to describe the unpaid, algorithm-driven results of any particular engine. However, a sophisticated search engine optimization company will often take the meaning of “organic” one step further. To such companies, the description of “organic SEO” is not to limited what shows up in the “natural” search engine results – it includes the methodologies used to achieve such rankings. There’s more than one way to skin a cat (although I must admit that I don’t know the one way that everyone else presumably knows), and the same is true for achieving natural search engine results. A search engine optimization company usually falls into one of two camps. A “White Hat” search engine optimization company will use a largely content-based approach and will not violate the terms of... 

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes What is RSS? You probably have seen this three-letter acronym in the course of your internet surfing. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website. An RSS is a means of publicizing updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so that they could decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source. What are the benefits of RSS? RSS gives benefits to both readers (users) and web publishers. 1. It gives you the latest updates. Whether it is about the weather, new music, software upgrade, local news, or a new posting from a rarely-updates site learn about the latest as... 

Reading time: 9 – 15 minutes When researching SEO companies, it is tempting to choose any company willing to offer guaranteed SEO services. It is human nature people love a guarantee. This holds especially true for purchases where the buyer is purchasing something outside of his or her area of comfort. When companies first consider pursuing search engine optimization (SEO) as a potential marketing channel, particularly when there is an ongoing cost involved, they get a sense of comfort from purchasing “guaranteed SEO.” Unfortunately, with many SEO companies, this confidence in the guarantee is ill-placed. A lot of questionable SEO companies offer what I like to refer to as a “leprechaun repellent” guarantee. In other words, it’s a guarantee that is easily attainable if you purchase such services and are not subsequently harassed by a pesky leprechaun, the guarantee has been met. How can you complain? The truth is that SEO companies do not control... 

Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes We’ve all heard about it-it seems like all the buzz right now in the search engine marketing industry is RSS. If you’re a website owner, than there are two ways your website can benefit from using RSS on your website-you can provide an RSS feed or, for the not-so-technically-inclined folks like me, you can use an RSS feed to keep your site’s content fresh. RSS is a way to syndicate website content. According to Wikipedia, “RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs…the RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data.” Wikipedia goes on to say that “A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well...