Websynthesis; growing a healthy website.

October 20, 2007 2 Comments

Planting a website Before you commit to planting a website, make sure that you have enough time to commit to the project. Without proper attention over time, your website, links and content will get stale and rot. A good amount of time would be an hour or two each week to make sure you get a successful and blooming website.

Choose carefully when you start out making your website, some breeds require far more skill and handling than others. I would encourage you to practice by making a social network site link Linkedin.com, myspace or facebook first. These are starter projects with all the tools you need already provided.

Once you’ve had a little bit of practice, take a good long week thinking about what kind of output you want from your site. Just something pretty to look at, an annual website, like for a festival or event, that has it’s season and is done with?Or do you have something in mind that will be perennial and will have interest again and again. Are you looking for something thats just for looks or do you want something that will produce for you?

When you’ve decided the type of website to plant, lay some ground work out first on paper for you to refer back to so you can keep track of your progress. Preparing the soil is very important and be sure to pick a domain name that has enough room in it for your site to grow roots and spread out in, domain names can severely restrict your sites ability to grow if chosen poorly.

A lot of websites whither under the glaring sun of GYM( Google, Yahoo, MSN), so make sure your site is prepared to handle the scrutiny. There is always a temptation to try out “secret tips and tricks” that are supposed to make your plant grow unnaturally fast, but these almost always have side effects and can kill your website.

When you know if you want a perennial or annual site, choosing hosting is much easier. If it’s cheap and easy then so much the better for your annual site. But if you’re going long term, then consider slightly more expensive hosting, because it will give you a better structure for your site to grow into.

Now that you’ve laid your ground work it’s time to dig into that soil and plant your site. There are two basic approaches to this process, either dig in and plant a massive bulb, that already has enough nutrients to burst forth quickly, or start with a smaller site that may need time to germinate. Naturally, your site won’t be basking in the warm glow of GYM for a while, as it germinates, takes root and sends up it’s sprouts. It’s easy to get over anxious in this waiting stage and you will find yourself religiously checking it’s beginning placement in GYM.

You can use many different kinds of links to fertilize your site. These will allow your roots to spread out evenly and their link love will get absorbed into your sites overall quality. Beware, because alot of links aren’t fertilizer, they’re bull sh*t that you’ll have to pay an arm and a leg for and will have no benefit for your site whatsoever. Choose quality inbound links, from social networks, other local website growers, or from directories. The best being a combination of all three kinds of links, these will help your site flourish under GYM.

Once your site is sprouting, it will be up to you if you want to pay for miracle grow, because pay per click can be expensive over time. You can also use way to much of it and waste your investment very quickly.

Tend to your site, check it’s roots and you’ll most likely want to encourage branches on your site. These branches may come off on different topics, and will give you more area for GYM to spread it’s loving glow over. Be mindful to trim and prune over time, because your branches may get too heavy and cause your site to tople over. Sometimes, you can graft on new branches that weren’t there initialy. Be careful when you do this that you aren’t stealing other peoples branches. This practice tends to fail as the branches have little to do with your original site and will wither under GYM’s Glare.

The more time you spend pouring your energy into the site, the more it will be watered and continue to grow. Once you energy mixes with the chlorophyll in your website and the warm glow of GYM, you will see the magic of Websythnesis. This combining of the site, your time and GYM will begin to produce fruit or flowers depending on your original choice. Keep the site fertilized, watered and it will flourish.

So… are you ready to get your hands dirty and start planting?

Filed under content writing advice, Search engine advice

Who beleives in the Internet?

October 13, 2007 Leave a Comment

I was working on a project that involves getting local business people to participate in a website. It was a lot more difficult that I had imagined. I guess that the internet doesn’t seem real to a lot of business owners, which is a shame because there is a lot of benefit to be had especially for small business owners.

If you believe in the internet, clap your hands!

Filed under Random

City pages and providing relevant content

October 6, 2007 1 Comment

    If you were curious about a community you’d like to move to, what type of information would you want to know? What makes up a city? Is it the sheer number of people in the area? How much is their average income? What is the weather like? What is there to do for activities, or recreation, what cities or resources are nearby? What is the city government like? What part of the city is the most expensive? Is it a new city or does it have some history behind it?

When you build your content for a particular city remember that the page is only valuable if it is something that somebody actually might want to know. People are not going to go and see how much corn was raised in a city before they move there. Be sure to write interesting information that you would like to find yourself if you were moving to a new city.

If you believe in tele-kinesis..raise my hand.
Kurt Vonnegut

Filed under content writing advice, Geographically sensitive keywords

Geo Keywords – Geographic Placement and Search Engine Placement

October 4, 2007 2 Comments

The thing that I love about search engines is that common sense rules the methods they use to determine value. It’s common sense that if you’re providing valuable content for website visitors about a particular topic, the search engines will view that positively and increase your relevancy to the keyword.

This brings us back to the concept of keywords specific to a geographic area, I’ll call them Geo Keywords for short. When your business is based around a Geo keyword, you have a open door for content writing that you shouldn’t ignore. Your opening is that when you have a Geo keyword, you aren’t competing against all of the people across the world for the term. Look at the term “Content Writing Advice“, the search engines are going to look for information relevant to Content, Writing, Advice, Content Writing, Content Advice, Writing Advice, and other terms that are relative to that area of information on your website. This means that anybody, anywhere who posts information to the world wide web that the search engines see is going to be competing for that keyword. Now lets take a look at “Riverside Content Writing”, now the search engines are going to look for content writing, but also for your relevance to Riverside. The advantage is that you have now narrowed down your competition from a international scale where large companies are most likely going to dominate, to a more local scale where your competition less fierce.

The second advantage to Geo Keywords is that you have a term of relevance that has large amounts of information available to you to use. You can go to city hall and pickup a fly-er on the city, pick up a book from the library and like we learned in our public school system, paraphrase to success! This approach makes writing content half as difficult to achieve, because the research is done for you already. This also applies to your strategy for your site visitors. If your a real estate agent, and are trying to get people to buy homes in your area, having unique relevant content about the community they will be moving to is paramount to capturing out of state buyers. Having that content at your fingertips just makes it easier for you to build up your content.

Good Night and Good Luck

Filed under content on google searches, content writing advice, Geographically sensitive keywords Tagged with

Meta Content Writing Advice

October 2, 2007 3 Comments

Most people don’t realize that every page they have gives a description of the content of the page to the Search engines, and that is used for the “Snippets” that appear on their results. It’s ironic because it’s actually one of the few things that should be straight forward…I’m talking about your “Meta-Description”. The reason that most people forget about their meta descriptions is because they do not appear to the regular visitor to the page. They only appear when that page gets indexed by a search engine and then it will display as a snippet under your Meta-Title.

My advice when writing this meta content, is to keep it simple. If you look at the snippets in Google, you’ll see that it only reads so many characters before it gets cut off. Be sure that your snippet accurately describes the page, in a different way from the meta title. This is a very important step because you will only be doing yourself a disservice by duplicating the title.

It is important to note that this strategy will definitely assist in getting more click through on your snippets.  A well thought out description can attract traffic that might have just passed you by if you hadn’t provided a description and the search engine generated one from random text pulled from the page.

Courage,

Filed under content writing advice Tagged with , ,

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