The power of the written word

Comfortably snowed in, I sit by the fireplace with my cat looking curiously at me (I think she knows what I'm doing ~ Shhhh...), as I type away with this post.

Today I am going to stray from the more technical path in this post and actually talk about something much more intuitive and obvious; it's called content.

Adding tags and metas is fine, but what it all comes down to is actually structuring your content to be professional and, frankly, pleasant! Maybe your high school essays left something to be desired, but still try writing something that frames what you're presenting a little better than "Hey guys, this is something great I found online. Enjoy!".

 You see, properly structured content acts in two ways:

 a) Google reads it and cross-references it to your meta keywords, your page title and the site and page URLs and from that it judges whether you are actually serving what you claim to be via all that data. It doesn't appear to hurt anybody for having inconsistent data, but it doesn't help them either, especially in google searches.

b) Frankly, help the visitor out. Vague statements are rarely of any use or help. There was some reason your language teacher went blue for repeating over and over again how an essay (or any statement) should be structured. People who enjoy what they read are more prone to come back to enjoy some more. For my part, I can remember IM conversations that were vastly more enjoyable that a look at some teenagers' blogs. Such satisfied customers will generate repeat traffic which will, undoubtedly, boost your Google (and any and all search engine) status.

In closing, my dear friends, it is expedient that you learn to communicate through writing; the power of the written word is your weapon and ally! Use it wisely. Goodnight.

Other Meta tags

Some of the things search engines grade a website for is quality. Quality means a website that caters both to the search engines AND to the user. The later, which we will discuss in a later post, has to do with each webpage's setup, which has to be both functional and pleasing to the eye.

Now, search engine wise quality means having well written and tidy html, css and any other elements that populate the website code. Part of that is drawing a detailed picture of the website in terms search engines understand and that's were meta tags come in. I discussed the 'keyword' meta tag in my first post and now I will introduce you to the most important of them.

Attribute	Value	Description
content	text	Specifies the content of the meta information.
http-equiv	content-type content-style-type X-UA-Compatible expires set-cookie others	Provides an HTTP header for the information in the content attribute.
name	author owner copyright revisit-after author generator revised zipcode distribution no-email-collection others	Provides a name for the information in the content attribute.
name	description	It's the introduction to your webpage search engines will see AND display in users' searches, thus helping users decide whether your webpage is right for them.
name	keywords	It's the keywords your website will associated with and search engines will grade its performance against...
name	robots googlebot slurp msnbot	Specifies the webpages status regarding all, or particular search engines.
scheme	format/URI	Specifies a scheme to be used to interpret the value of the content attribute.
dir	rtl ltr	Specifies the text direction for the content in an element
lang	language_code	Specifies a language code for the content in an element
xml:lang	language_code	Specifies a language code for the content in an element

And there's many more tags that will help define your website page per page if you have to.

As stated earlier, questions and comments will be tolerated... have a nice day!

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with Derek

Soooo, this is a first for me, blogging and such. So here comes my mission statement:

I most solemnly promise to give SEO tips and hold discussions on how to best promote one's website money free and increase its value to search engines.

>>Moving on to business

The most obvious and primary optimization method I use is meta keywords. I wring my noodle all the way, I pressure the client to give me some pointers (a few dozen words from someone else are always good!) and, if push comes to shove (do people actually say that anymore?), I cannibalize the internet!

Yep, you... read me right! Cause, let's face it, unless your webpage is about "Japanese spaghetti kite knitting" (cause Japan is synonymous with originality - wtf is wrong with those people? must be the island, you know, being caged with a bunch of them must be driving each of them bananas!), then there must be about a billion webapages selling the same stuff you are. So, just decide what the terms that you want your webpage to relate to are, google them and then open the top 5 websites that come up and check out their keywords and copy the rmost relevant ones. So simple!

Protip: IF you later decide to do Google adwords, then your keywords become assets and tools for your campaign!

Thank you all, I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did!