:Article Marketing At Its Best

The methods by which we use to contact each other, especially in internet marketing activities continue to undergo dramatic transformation. In the not to distant past (only a couple of years ago!) we kept in touch with customers - existing or potential new ones, using the telephone, fax machines, direct mail marketing and even in-person meetings. Today, people expect more frequent updates, new information, and the latest of everything. So much so that it is literally impossible to keep up with this dizzying pace and certainly not on a continuing or ongoing basis with any consistency. Thankfully, blogging has come to the rescue. Setting up a blog on your web site - and having an associated RSS feed - means you can keep in constant touch with your clients and potential customers. Plus you don’t have to email them and they can get your latest news without having to visit your web site.

So how does this all work? A blog is really a fancy name for a web page that gets updated regularly. It’s nothing special. There are several methods of writing ‘blogs’, but they are nothing more than computer programs which allow you to easily update a web page. Far and away the easiest way to start a blog is with a popular blog website. One example is called blogger.com.

However, for keeping in touch with your customers, RSS is the key. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. What this means is that your blog can be automatically delivered to people who want to read it - you don’t have to send it to them and neither do they have to come and collect it. All they need is the address of your RSS Feed and their RSS Newsreader can do the job for them. There are several RSS readers available and new web browsers incorporate the ability to read RSS feeds and keep them updated.

Whenever you add new content to your blog, the RSS Feed automatically gets updated in everyone’s Reader program or web browser. That means you are guaranteed to be able to keep in touch with clients and prospects. You don’t have to do anything other than produce the content. Equally, you don’t face the problems of email filters and anti-spam programs blocking your email. Furthermore, people tend to read RSS Feeds because they have subscribed to them whereas they tend to ignore non urgent emails.

After a small amount of basic research and reading, you will quickly see, there are numerous advantages to Blogs and RSS Feeds. One of the biggest reasons is that search engines love them. This is because blogs provide fresh and new content - precisely the thing that searchers are looking for. Hence the search engines are actively pushing blogs higher up the search engine ranking. What this means to internet marketers is that if you don’t have a blog for your business, you are potentially reducing your chances of a high search engine ranking. You need a blog nowadays to get noticed by the search engines.

For all the reasons mentioned above (and many, many more), blogging is essential. Not only does it improve your web presence, it also means you can keep in touch with clients and prospects more easily. All the marketing research you can find will tell you that regular contact with your customers is a vital component in retaining existing clients, as well as gaining new business. Don’t put it off any longer; it is time to get your blog going—today!

Stephen Wright is President & CEO of InternetMarketingUSA.com
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Okay so now we know all there is to know about content and keywords. Hah! But you did get the basics. It may be a good point to stop and talk about Keywords, Tags, Categories and all that as well. Logically, in progression this should come much later, but because there seems such misunderstandings about Technorati, Del.icio.us and other tagging systems, it may be a good place to put this down.

These articles began because of a thread at Absolute Write called “What Is Your Technorati Rank?” On perusing that thread I realized that many writers were placing their hopes in something that just was not going to happen. More so, they were actually misreading the importance of certain “rankings” and thus ignoring the more important factors.

If you read the previous articles in this series you now hopefully understand “keyword basics”. So we are going to use Technorati for our example.

So along comes techie #1 and says:

“Hey, you know what. Blogs are becoming mainstay business. They are great for people with no knowledge of HTML and you can literally put up a web-site Weblog in minutes. So now they are multiplying over the net faster than rabbits, and the Search Engines are ignoring them for the most part as most of them contain personal musings and ramblings. So why not create a sophisticated search engine for blogs?”

“Great idea,” says techie #2, “a search engine from blogs. And that means anyone who has a blog will want to register with us. But how are we going to build it. Obviously, normative search engine technology is not what we want.”

“You know what?” says techie #1 “we are going to take keywords, call them by a different name and create a closed system!”

And thus Technorati was born.

What essentially goes on in Technorati, is you define what you write with “tags”, Technorati tags. These are keywords, (with a special HTML parameter). Keywords just like you will learn to use in your meta tags. Technorati then in a CLOSED SYSTEM connects all the blogs with the same keywords. Technorati does not look at content to a great extent (to my knowledge), they pay attention to the tags re: keywords that you input. If you do not input keywords they use your keywords in your Blog setup.

Okay this is great for all those people looking for blogs say about hairdressing. So they come to Mr. & Mrs. Hair’s blog because the Hair couple input keywords as Technorati tags. Simple.

Technorati now goes one step further. Technorati rates your blog based upon a few parameters. One of those “important” parameters is how many other people in the Technorati Network (Only those IN the network, or those using Technorati tags) have linked to your blog or a post on it. So by gaining links (there is no concept on Technorati as “bleeding links” as far as I know), you move up in the ladder. But even Technorati also keeps track of how popular your blog is. You can have 200 links into your blog, but if no one visits then your standing will not go up to the top 100.

Okay, that is Technorati. Important for bloggers? Well it is a popular site, and growing. So the answer would be yes. Important for Google, MSN and Yahoo — not on its own…yet there is one critical Caveat.

When someone links to your site in a blog or web site, the href HTML links are in the code. The Search Engines when they read the code with their bots (see how much web lingo you know already!) sees these links. Those get added to the amount of sites linking to you. They are “hot links” or “back links” into your blog or posts in your blog. So linking not only works in the closed world of Technorati tags, but also works in the Wide World of Search Engine placement. Those links are important. Now if you get linked in a very popular blog, that counts for a lot in the world of Search Engine placement. (As we discussed in the previous articles.)

So while it is nice to know your Technorati ranking is going up, what is IMPORTANT is to remember to use their tools of tagging and linking to get others to discover and link to your blog. That gets noticed by the Search Engines. Not immediately to be sure but if you are being hit a great deal and have links to you, sooner rather than later the Search Engines will pick up your blog and your keywords. They will NOT look at the Technorati tags though, they will look at your meta tag keywords and your content. (Oy Vey! so many things to remember)

Del.icio.us and others work on the same concept, though del.icio.us is more centralized and called a “social book-marking service”. Just remember the rule of thumb:

The more sites that link to you and your post, no matter for what reason, the better it is for you and your position in the Search Engines.

Okay now what are Categories? Categories really belong in Wiki format, and this is not the scope or place to discuss Wiki and the technology behind it. I own a new Wiki site, and you are welcome to peruse JewishPedia because on a Wiki site you can view all the code to each article.

Categories in blogs (Wordpress implements them automatically) are a way to search for something. I have Categories in my blog, but this is a code implemented Category Listing in Google’s blogger system, where when you click, the blog does a Google Blog search in my blog for all articles related to that word. And thus it depends on Google’s specific Blog Search Engine (not their regular search engine).

Remember, Google and others have specific Blog search engines. It is important to be on the top in those as well, BUT for mainstream, if you are using a Blog for whatever reason, your goal is to be in the normative search engines as well, and in a good placement there.

So there you have it. Tags = Keywords. Technorati uses them in the closed world of Technorati. The employ linking counts as well. These keywords and links, if done correctly, are also very useful for Search Engine rankings if your blog is popular. deli.ci.ous uses them for “social” blogging.

So don’t give up on Technorati. Just don’t believe it is the golden answer to be good rankings in the Search Engines. It is but one of the myriad of possibilities.

“The more sites that link to you and your post, no matter for what reason, the better it is for you and your position in the Search Engines.”

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