Web 2.0: Blogs – What are they and how do they work?

This week we will dive in-depth into one of my favorite areas of Web 2.0: Blogs.

Blogs have revolutionized the business world as well as the communications of individual businesses. Blogs are becoming essential on the local and national level. They also benefit the everyday individual looking to further their career, share their personal life, network with others in the same field, or just learn more about the web community.

As the third installment of a five article series, you are well on your way to becoming an expert in Web 2.0. For the purposes of this series, Web 2.0 is defined as websites that build on community or offer a service. Web 2.0 allows for interactive viewing of the net. (Refer to the last two weeks for more information.)

To continue to move you forward as an expert in Web 2.0, we will look at what blogs are, how blogs began, and the advantages of blogs for businesses and individuals.

What Are Blogs?

According to Wikipedia, the term “blog” is a contraction of “Web log.” A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

How did Blogs begin?

Blogs could be found in their earliest forms when individuals began keeping online personal diaries in the 1990s. Early weblogs were simple, manually updated components of common websites. Corporations and businesses jumped on the bandwagon by creating sections such as “In the News” and “What

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What is Wiki and how does it work?

Gone are the days of door-to-door Encyclopedia salesmen. Gone are the days where parents have to save and buy individual books of an encyclopedia with the hopes of one day being able to purchase a complete set before the information becomes outdated. Our society has transformed into a place where Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia, has become a household name. How did this happen?

Today, kids and adults alike have a wealth of research and information available at the touch of a button. This evolution is thanks to some new software, a concept known as Wiki, and its role as part of the Web 2.0 culture.

Continuing with the in-depth look of Web 2.0, this week

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How Web 2.0 And Social Bookmarking Can Work For You

Web 2.0 should be at the center of every business owners plan to survive in the Internet world. It is the latest rage sporting the covers of several magazines as well as the biggest topic on the web. It is speculated to be the resurgence of the dot com boom. For the next five weeks, we will look at Web 2.0, specifically social bookmarking, wikis, blogs, Squidoo and Video, and how they affect business owners.

So What Is Web 2.0?

There is still controversy surrounding what exactly the term Web 2.0 entails. Some view it as a marketing buzzword while others view it as the new wisdom of the Internet. For the purpose of this newsletter we are looking at Web 2.0 as the new conventional wisdom of the Internet. Web 2.0 is defined as websites that build on community or offer a service. Rather than offering simply static information, Web 2.0 allows for interactive viewing of the net. There are several sites that have already mastered the Web 2.0 phenomenon such as Flickr, MySpace, Squidoo, YouTube and the social bookmarking site del.icio.us.

The function of these sites is to use community to maintain content. Tim O’Reilly, founder of O

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A Beginner’s Guide to Google AdWords

This guide has been written to help you get started in Google Adwords and save you time and effort on initial research.

You may already be familiar with the ins and outs of Google search results. However, just in case you aren’t familiar where ads appear, Google’s paid ads appear separately in the search results on the right hand side of the screen and in some instances at the top of the screen. For example let’s use one of the most competitive terms for paid ads, “search engine optimization”. As you can see below, the #1 ad pays the most for your click and #2 second most and so on to the last paid ad paying the least.

Google AdWords can provide an inexpensive advertising venue for you to increase your leads. However, you need to do your research to ensure you achieve a positive ROI

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SEO Tools

SEO tools are useful and can help you to develop and refine your campaign. We offer a variety of free tools that can help you keep your SEO on track.

Link Popularity Checker and Link Quality Assessment

This is a great tool to help you analyze the links to your site. Links play a vital role in good organic search engine rankings. Not only is link popularity important, the quality of those links is also very important. Use the free Link Popularity Checker and Link Quality Checker tool to find out the necessary statistics on your links and your competitor’s links.

The tool includes information on inbound links, deep links, directory links, and your search engine indexing statistics.

Add a link to this useful tool from your own site by adding the following code:

<a href=”http://www.elixirsystems.com/tools/linkpopularity.php”>Link Popularity Checker and Link Quality Assessment Tool</a>

Use the tool to look at your current statistics and the statistics of your competitors now.

Social Tagging Tool

Social tagging is creating a buzz as a way to create publicity for your sites content and increase your inbound links. However submitting your information to these sites can be time consuming and hard work. We have made it easier for you! Use this tool to automatically submit your content.

Add a link to this useful tool from your own site by adding the following code:

<a href=”http://www.elixirsystems.com/tools/sociable/”>Social Tagging Tool</a>

Or even use the tool to allow users to tag your site:

<a href=”http://www.elixirsystems.com/tools/sociable/?URL=www.yoursitename.com”>Tag This Page</a>

Use the tool to submit your site to social tagging sites.

WhoIs Lookup and Monitor

Check on the current whois information for other sites. This will give you the owner of the domain name and contact information. It can also be used to compare current information with previous records.

Add a link to this useful tool from your own site by adding the following code:

<a href=”http://www.elixirsystems.com/tools/whois.php”>WhoIs Lookup and Monitor Tool</a>

Use the tool to look at whois information of your company and your competitors now.

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HTML Meta Tags – What are they and how do you use them on your website?

What are they and how do you use them on your website?

By Dylan Downhill
Originally authored: 10 May 2004
Update: 13 July 2006

Below is a collection of the most useful tags found in a document <HEAD> section. It was inspired by an article I read that mentioned some of these tags but didn’t say why you included them, what they did and what options were available for the tag.

As background, meta tags were originally included to aid early search engines to summarize and categorize web pages correctly. Unfortunately everyone figured out that by optimizing their meta tags they could receive better rankings. As more sites started using over-optimized (spammed) meta tags, their usefulness for categorizing web pages diminished and most of the major search engines now treat them with little importance in their rankings.

This might seem the death of meta tags, however they have been extended and expanded through HTML 4.0 and still serve a purpose, though most are not for ranking in the SERPs.

TITLE Tag

This tag tells the search engines what your page is all about. It is probably the most important tag in the <head> section of your document. This field is often displayed in search engines results so should provide a good overview of the page (and of course have your main keyword in it).

<TITLE>Red Widgets for Sale</TITLE>

HTTP-EQUIV Tags

META tags with an HTTP-EQUIV attribute are equivalent to HTTP headers. Typically, they control the action of browsers, and may be used to refine the information provided by the actual headers. Tags using this form should have an equivalent effect when specified as an HTTP header, and in some servers may be translated to actual HTTP headers automatically or by a pre-processing tool.

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html;charset=iso-8859-1″>

This describes the language and format the document is in. Type indicates the type of content within the document (i.e. HTML, XML, etc). The charset indicates the character set. This meta tag is meant to override the content type preconfigured in both the server and the browser, however this does not always work as expected.

<meta http-equiv=”expires” content=”0″>

The date and time after which the document should be considered expired. The date field should read ‘Mon, 10 Apr 2004 14:32:39 GMT”. An invalid value (such as ’0′) will be taken as meaning expire immediately and is useful to stop a browser caching a document.

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Style-Type” content=”text/css”>

Specifies the default style sheet language for a document.

NAME Tags

Intended for the search engines to read and index, the following tags should always be included

<meta name=”distribution” content=”global”>

Ensure any page you want seen by the searching public is global.

<meta name=”author” content=”name”>

Who owns the site, or who designed the site. Set “name” to the name of the author of the document. Separate multiple authors with commas.

<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright 2004 www.ElixirSystems.com”>

Copyright information.

<meta name=”description” content=”text”>

Include your description of the site or page in the “text” field. To maximize your search engine ranking, be sure to use keywords within your description, but do not overstuff.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords, another keyword, 2->4 keywords “>

For more information on keywords see the articles in March and April 2004.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow, noodp “>

Tell the search engine robot to index and follow your document, this doesn’t mean that it will, it just gives the spiders permission.

One source the search engines use to generate titles and descriptions they show in the search engine results is DMOZ – the Open Directory Project, or ODP. Sometimes this results in less than enticing results being displayed. By adding the ‘noodp’ robots tag to the top of your files the search engines that support this tag will not use the DMOZ title and descriptions.

<meta name=”revisit-after” content=”30 days”>

This tag is not used by any search engine and should be avoided. Most of the major search engine spiders will index a page depending on the frequency of update – if you want a page indexed more often then update it more often.

<meta name=”rating” content=”text”>

Use “text” to indicate the rating of the site.

Useful Template

To save you cutting and pasting the above individually, below is everything together with the most useful options set and in their suggested order:

<title>Red Widgets for Sale</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Description”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords”>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Style-Type” content=”text/css”>
<meta http-equiv=”expires” content=”30 days”>
<meta name=”author” content=”Dylan Downhill”>
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright 2006 www.elixirsystems.com”>
<meta name=”distribution” content=”global”>
<meta name=”rating” content=”Safe For Kids”>
<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>Introduction to the most common HTML meta tags, their uses and their common attributes. Extended to include the new noodp tag.

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Trademark Infringement and Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertisers

Online brand names and trademarks are not fully protected by law. Competitors often use underhand tactics to infringe on brand or trademarks.

Trademarks distinguish your brands from your competitor

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Pay per Click’s New Challenger – MSN AdCenter

Look out Google Adwords (GAW) and Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM). A new opportunity for lowering costs, better targeting and better conversions is quickly approaching.

YSM (formerly Overture) has lost Microsoft, a key partner in their search network. MSN use to display YSM ads within MSN search results, but this is no longer the case. To add salt to the wound, their onetime partner is now a competitor. Microsoft

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Social Networks – Search Engine Marketing for Web2.0

There are few Search Engine Marketers who would debate that most community based websites are favored within Search Engine Results

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Understanding Search Engine Marketing

The use of search engines to help surf the Web has become commonplace. Everyone has a favorite, whether it be Google, Yahoo!, or AOL. And many business owners have finally discovered the ability to advertise on these engines to increase traffic and sales to their site. For beginners there are many terms bandied around relating to these search engines which can be confusing. And to add to the confusion it is becoming increasingly difficult to decipher between all of the “experts” and their advice that is so freely available. Perhaps the greatest confusion revolves around the meaning of “search engine optimization” and “search engine marketing.”

Search engine optimization is the act of altering a Web site so that it performs better in the ‘free’ organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. Organic search listings cannot be purchased. Web sites must be altered to be search engine friendly and to encourage the search engines to rank the Web pages for keywords and phrases that are relevant to the Web site and Web pages.

Search engine marketing is the act of marketing a Web site via search engines, whether it’s creating specific landing pages for your site, purchasing paid advertising on the results pages, or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities, including natural optimization.

The Importance of Keywords

Whether ranking through the ‘free’ organic listings or through paid search media, the most important step that most site owners have trouble comprehending is the importance of keywords. The key is to find keywords that are actually converting into sales. For example if you are a car dealer in Phoenix, does it really matter if you rank number one for “cars” in Google? Therefore, taking the time to use available technology to help define which keywords are used by your target market and really drive your desired results is really the first step in any search engine marketing program.

Search Engine Optimization

There are numerous tips and tools available to help you better optimize your site for the engines. Overall, search engine optimization is composed of programming elements that exist in three places: on the page, on the site, and off the site. In general, the consensus is that one must pay attention to:

• Title, Description and Keyword Meta Tags
• Site Structure and Programming
• Page Content Development
• Link Strategy

Search engines use complex algorithms to determine how they spider, index, and rank sites. These algorithms are constantly changing. While you can follow the various tips and resources to do it yourself, please keep in mind that gaining rank is a long-term process that requires consistent attention. It’s not just a one-off deal. Therefore you may want to consider outsourcing to an SEO expert. This is especially true if your site is a complex, dynamically driven e-Commerce site.

Search Engine Marketing

The search engine marketing space has become highly competitive. Paid search media is an advertising program where listings are guaranteed to appear in response to particular search terms, with higher ranking typically obtained by paying more than other advertisers. Paid placement listings can be purchased from a portal or a search network. For example, the listings a user sees in “boxes” at the top and along the left hand side of the page in Google are all paid advertising spots.

The major players in the space include Overture and Google Adwords. But, many forget to utilize the third tier players, which for smaller niche sites, sometimes produce even better results. Those include: Kanoodle, FindWhat, and Enhance.com.

Search Engines and your Business

People seem to think that they are somehow entitled to top ranking in the search engines. There is also the perception that these engines are government supplemented services. The truth is that they are independent businesses and so are responsible for profit and loss. This means that they decide how they run their business and how they rank Web sites.

What does this mean for your business? You should start by developing a search engine strategy. This can be done by utilizing ‘search engine optimization,’ ‘search engine marketing,’ or a combination of both. You should aim to educate yourself on these systems and determine how you can use them to further your online business. The goal is to increase your business visibility within the search engines and bring ‘qualified’ traffic to your site. The result will be increased sales which will ensure the continued success of your online business.

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