My Travels on the Net

I’m embarrassed to admit it but sometimes I can be a real Luddite. A few months ago a client started a weekly podcast I needed to listen to in order to help her market it. Listening to her podcast was no simple matter. I had to crank up the volume, lean in to the speakers and focus all my energy on deciphering the whisper in the distance. When I thought about it, I realized that I’d purchased my computer speakers in 1999. In computer years, that’s so old you’d need carbon dating to figure out their true age.

So last weekend I finally splurged and got new speakers. For $30, I got two speakers and subwoofer that make my surround sound stereo speakers sound like two tin cans and a string. I couldn’t believe the difference. It was like my monitor went from black and white to 3D color. All of a sudden, I’m willingly spending more time at my desk.

The first thing I did with my new world of audio was try out the music website Pandora. Pandora instantly became my new favorite website. You create "stations" by telling it what bands, composers or songs you like. Pandora then searches its database and plays music akin to your selection. You can then give it feedback, telling it what songs you like and which ones you don’t. It then further customizes play list. You can also listen to stations created by other users to find more music. Oh yeah, did I mention it’s free?

Check it out!

Many of us have heard that meta tags are important when optimizing your website for the search engines but most of us don't really understand what they are, how they help and what we can do to use them to our advantage.

Wikipedia defines meta tags this way, "Meta elements (or meta tags) provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly, and are inserted into the HTML code in the format illustrated above, but are not visible to a user looking at the site."

One of the most important meta tags is the title tag. If you go to Google and do a search on "eMarketing Strategist", the following is the first result returned. The title tag is the text that reads "eMarketing Strategist - Internet marketing that gets results..."

As you can see from this example, your title tag is usually the first text a searcher sees so you definitely want to have a good title tag. The challenging part is writing a title tag that makes both the search engines and searchers happy.

Recently, Jill Whalen, author of the great SEO newsletter High Rankings Advisor, wrote a very helpful article on title tags called All About Title Tags. Check it out and be sure to sign up for her newsletter while you're on her website.

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Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. Jill's handbook, "The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports, SEM seminars and is the co-founder of Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE) a local networking organization.

I was browsing the most read posts on Guy Kawaskai's blog and came across a gem of a post on blogging "The 120 Day Wonder: How to Evangelize a Blog". It's a good companion piece to my article "How to Blog With Out Having a Blog".

I've been trying to figure out how to utilize profesisonal networking sites such as LinkedIn and Soflow for a couple of years now. Professional networking websites pre-date MySpace but are only now being looked at as a serious source of clients and partners.

Guy Kawasaki has wirtten an article Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn that's got some interesting facts about people with a LinkedIn profile page such as "People with more than 20 connections are 34 times more likely to be approached with a job opportunity than people with less than 5." He also describes some great potential uses of it such as gauging the helth of a company or industry.

If you’ve launched a new website in the last couple of years, whether you know it or not you’ve encountered the Google Sandbox. What happens is that when you launch a new website, Google watches it for several months before displaying it in search results. This can be a big negative for a new company or an existing company using a new domain name. Google started the sandbox to make sure that websites they display in the search results are “real” websites and not just link farms or websites with duplicate content.

“Google Sandbox” is a rather euphemistic phrase. It should be called the “Google Quagmire”. SEO consultants have been trying to figure out how to get out of the sandbox since it first sent shock waves through the industry in 2004.

Andy Hagans—who knows his stuff when it comes to SEO—has written a very helpful article “Secrets to Beating the Sandbox” on what you can do to minimize the amount of time your website spends stuck in the sandbox and maximize the time it spends attracting visitors.