SEO. Keywords. Metatags. Metadescriptions. Spiders.
Robots.
Do you feel overwhelmed when you hear people talking
about all these things? Most people do. Here's a quick
glossary, and then the reason you don't have to worry about
these words if you know a couple of web secrets.
Metatags – Words embedded in your web page that tell
viewers and search engine automatons about the
content on your page.
Metadescriptions – Same as metatags, but in sentence
form, and with the possibility of being used on search
engines as your site description.
Keywords – The words you use in your metas and in
the text on your page to describe your product or
service.
Spiders or Robots – miniprograms or automations sent
out to automatically browse the Web by search
engines, they catalog your site by keywords.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization, this means your
site has the appropriate keywords and structure to be
properly cataloged by those spiders and robots.
Here's why this information isn't that important: it's archaic.
Metas were devised in the early days of the search engines,
when they weren't terribly powerful, so that your good
content could be properly referenced by the engines. What
they found was that unscrupulous webmasters loaded up the
metas with keywords that were popular and would rank well,
but that really had nothing to do with the content on the
page. This is called search engine spam because it works the
same way and is approximately as useful.
Spiders today don't pay much attention to the metas. They
look for keywords in your content, and the most cuttingedge
ones look for grammatical structure as well. It won't be
long before they can tell whether your site is actually
sensible. And they are looking for web pages that are
frequently updated, not just static sites that contain the
same information year in and year out.
Interestingly, your customers are looking for good content
as well. One simple little trick can satisfy both of them
inexpensively.
Good articles containing information about your product or
service, rotated regularly.
Drive Traffic with Great Content
Not everyone can write well enough to fulfill this
requirement. And not everyone has the time to sit and write
these articles. For those who can't, there are several
options.
You can hire a professional writer to ghostwrite these
articles for you. This is an expensive and time-consuming
prospect. Most writers charge a minimum of $35 per hour,
and web writers often charge much more. And you'll have to
sit with that writer, educate him or her on your product or
service, and ensure they're ready to tackle writing about it
before they start.
You can copy someone else's content without
permission. BAD IDEA. Not only is it illegal, but the search
engines are smarter than that. If they find identical content
on multiple sites (easier than you might think – check out
http://www.copyscape.com/) they simply won't list either
one, or they'll list the one that was original.
You can copy someone else's content with permission.
This is an interesting idea. There are a number of online
databases that provide pre-written articles optimized for
your keywords, for free. The hitch: you must also display a
resource box on your website referencing the original author
of the article and providing a link back to his or her page.
This makes them into the expert, not you.
You can purchase keyword-optimized articles from an
article broker like YourOwnArticles.com. This is the
happy medium. You have good optimized articles, created
for you by professional writers, published on your site with
your name, and costing you minimal cash because they are
mass-produced.
Using Article Directories for Your Purposes
But wait, there's more!
After you purchase articles to publish on your website with
your name, you can also buy extras to publish to article
directories. Not everyone's going to be as smart as you
about how they put content on their site. Many will instead
take the easy way, and download those free articles to
publish, with resource boxes, to their own website.
If they download your articles, those resource boxes will
point to your website. In essence, you can direct traffic from
your competitors and from those who provide similar or
complementary products and services to you, straight to
your own website. And you can do it for free, after the cost
of the article.
Some article directories online are:
Go Articles: http://www.goarticles.com
Ezine Articles: http://www.ezinearticles.com
Idea Marketers: http://www.ideamarketers.com
Marketing Seek: http://www.marketingseek.
com/index.php
You can also do a periodic search at Copyscape, referenced
above, to see who's using your articles and ensure they are
not tampering with your resource box in any way.
