Advertise

As with any business, you must advertise. They say word of mouth is the best advertising. This may be true, but it is only useful if you have the patience to wait a hundred years or so for it to pay off. In the meantime, you’ll need another job. These are tongue-in-cheek statements, of course, but the intention is to remind you again that no matter how pretty your site is, no matter how scientifically it is monetized, it takes too long to make any money if you just sit back and wait for people to notice you and tell their friends about you.

Advertise. Be very proactive in this regard. Many things you do to get traffic to your site technically fall under the umbrella of advertising. When you strive to get people to link to you, is that not advertising? But what this post is about is direct advertising that you pay for. Generally this is in the category of pay-per-click advertising.

Whether you choose the most obvious, Google’s Adsense, or whether you choose another of the several very good other sources that have been springing up around the internet, you just need to do it. This generally involves setting up an advertising budget you can live with and bidding on keywords--words that describe the subject of your business. Then the advertising company can run your ad where it will be most effective.

How many other ways can you think of that come under the heading of advertising?

Titles of blog posts

One big way people find you is by typing in search terms in a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, so it is important that you set up your site in such a manner as to facilitate the search engines not only finding you, but in accurately defining your site’s subject matter.

People used to get very inventive in this regard, to the point of being deceptive. Running a blog, on the other hand, helps take care of this important function almost automatically. Over time, the many, many words you write in your blog help the search engine robots understand what you are all about more and more accurately. This is because key words and key phrases are repeated naturally in the flow of writing, without you having to contrive awkward sentences that contain keywords.

But you can still refine this. One way is to pay attention to the titles of your posts. Make them short and pithy and descriptive of what your post is about. I have a tendency to get cute, as if I were writing chapter titles in a book. When you are dealing with a robot, don’t get cute. Be simple and straightforward.

There are whole industries which have sprung up on the subject of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM.) That’s how important it is. If you are in business on the internet, keep the search engine robots always in your mind as you work on your site. Make working with search engines second nature.

Your blog's theme

After you decide upon a subject you are interested in, go ahead and start researching that subject on the Web and blogging about your findings. At the same time, begin working on your main website. This is the website whose domain name you own and is the place where you will be displaying your product reviews and product pictures.

Is it absolutely necessary to have two websites working in tandem like that?--both a blog and a “regular” website? Of course not. You can do it all with a blog alone if you are careful to keep it simple and straightforward. But if you choose to do it that way, please blog from your own website with your own domain name. You will be taken more seriously than if you “sub-blog” from a free blogging service, such as Google (blogspot) or the free version of Wordpress. Not that you can’t use Wordpress software and templates, for example, just do it from your own official website if you possibly can, instead of one of their free blogs.

Of course, even a free blog from Blogspot or Wordpress is better than doing nothing. Get up and get going! Get started today! But normally you will be using the free blogging services as “funnel sites” for your primary business sites. Nothing against Blogspot or Wordpress, obviously--I use them myself and they offer a great service. It’s just that you have more control over your destiny when you have your own “real” website.

Always looking for Google loopholes

Did you ever think what might happen if Google stopped worrying about whether the search content returned was truly relevant? I mean, what would happen if some searcher typed in the words “American Civil War” into the search field, and Google simply returned all the websites that claimed to have something to do with those words? If a porn site had a meta description of American Civil War, or had those words in hypertext repeated over and over on the top three lines of their home page, then that site would be returned for the searcher’s consideration.

Ridiculous.

Of course it’s ridiculous. This illustrates the need for Google to try and verify that the actual site content is relevant to the search.

As with so many other things in this world, it is the bad apples in the barrel who spoil the good thing for the rest of us. As soon as Google tried to do something good, they were immediately confronted with cheaters and charletons and liers and other scum who were determined to do it the easiest way, the dishonest way, rather than the right way. The goal was to get search engine traffic to their sites, and they didn’t care at all how they did it.

Would you like to find out where to track down the spammers that are inundating your email with trash? My guess is that if you find a website cheating for page rank, doing all the things they can think of to “beat” Google’s search algorithm, these are the same people who also send out spam at night. They have no scruples when it comes to getting traffic to their site. Just my opinion, of course.

The next time you visit a website that proudly offers, for a price, to teach you ways to outwit Google, think of the owner of that website as a spammer. He probably is.

Wagging the dog

If it weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious. Webmasters who desire to get a high Google page ranking try to comply with what Google wants them to do. If Google lets it be known that links are good, then webmasters will proceed to go out and try to get links to their websites. In a freemarket system, this process can often get creative.

Tomorrow, if Google were to decide that sites should be ranked higher if they have an animation of a black dog on a red background at the upper left hand corner of your header, what do you think would shortly happen?

And later, if Google desides that sites should be ranked lower if webmasters PAY someone to create the doggie animation, then what?

Google ranking means money. Serious money. So I am trying my best not to laugh here. On this blog you are reading right now, it is obvious that I don’t give a rat’s patoot about Google or what they think. I am free to speak my piece and kick sand in their face. Not so on some of my enterprises which turn a profit. So I do feel your pain and exasperation.

More to follow.

Google knows best

We can see that Google has begun a pardigm shift from simply being a search engine that seeks to return relevant content to their searcher-user, to a sort of gatekeeper-ranker. Dare we say “censor?” Of course. How could you NOT say that Google is censoring the content that the searcher sees? Of course, they would probably prefer to call it something like Advanced Algorithm Filtering Service. Be that as it may, when you search for something and Google returns not only relevant content, but only the relevant content they want you to see, that is the dictionary definition of censorship.

The purpose of this post is not really to badger Google about being a big bad censor, but rather trying to clarify the question, “What is Google?” They are no longer a search engine, but are now a rating service as well. That’s really good news for those of you who can’t decide for yourselves, or don’t want to be bothered. Type in some search words, get some content returned to you that Google wants you to see. Choose from among the choices that Google presents to you. No problem.

To be continued.

What is Google’s purpose?

Without looking up their official bio, my memory tells me that Google began as one of the early attempts to index the web. The purpose of indexing the web is the same as the purpose for indexing anything else: to point the user toward content they want to look at. That’s why libraries have card catalogs and that’s why big textbooks have those tiny word pages in the back.

The indexing function, or cataloging function, of the internet is considerably more sophisticated today, and is performed by something called a search engine rather than an indexer.The desired result is still to try to take the user to the place he wants to go, or give him the information he wants to see, just do a better job of it.

With so many new websites springing up, traditional indexing really wasn’t feasible for very long. Hence the development of search engines. (Both Google and Yahoo still offer traditional “directories” to the web, though. and If you have the time and patience to drill down through their hierarchy, have at it.)

The trouble is, along with more sophisticated methods came the opportunity to additionally try to tell people what Google thought was “good” content and what they thought was poorer or “less apropos” content. This was under the guise of “providing users with the most relevant content” rather than just providing a list of possibilities and letting the user decide what he wanted to investigate further. Kind of like a librarian recommending a particular book instead of simply pointing you to the section of the library where books on that subject might be found.

More to follow.

Google: can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em

If you ask internet travelers who or what Google is, chances are they will simply say that Google is a search engine. They use Google to find things on the internet. True. To an internet entrepreneur, however, Google is much more than that.

A lot of people who are trying to eke out a living on the internet these days, trying to make a buck doing something they love to do, have begun to think of Google as some sort of mysterious internet god, on whose good graces their internet livelihood depends. Indeed, Google itself has lately seemed to fancy itself as some sort of supreme arbiter of all things internet: Google giveth, and Google taketh away, or so they seem to think.

Here’s the truth: Google is a website. You have a website. I have a website. Google has a website. Google earns a living by selling something on the internet. So do you and I. And all of us, Google included, live or die on the internet depending on whether people do or do not visit our websites.

Google’s income is derived from selling advertising. Many of us regular people try to make money selling advertising, too. We all have our methods of attracting traffic to our websites. Google’s gimmick to attract visitors to its website is that it has discovered a way to index the internet pretty well, and thus has made itself useful to internet travelers.

Unfortunately, Google’s success in being useful has put them in a position of being able to hurt some pretty good people. Over the years, Google has slowly changed from simply publishing what is essentially a dynamic “telephone” book of names and addresses, and selling some “yellow pages”-type advertsing, to thinking they have the right to establish the criteria under which all “good” businesses should operate.

There is a huge leap between simply providing an honest list of internet denizens along with a brief description of what they have to offer, to telling internet searchers whether or not this or that business is “good” or not. Worse, Google gets to define what “good” is—or so they seem to think of late.

All this seems kind of uppity until you step back and realize you are doing the same thing. So am I. We all decide what appears or does not appear on our websites. We don’t feel an obligation to be fair about it, either; our decisions are arbitrary and final. Our goal is to produce the most effective website we can produce. I think that is Google’s goal as well: not just content but relevant content. That’s what Google wants to return to their searchers.

Then again, you and I don’t have the power to affect so many people with our websites like Google does.

I read somewhere a quote by a Canadian politician which wittily, though superficially, summed up the essence of Canada’s love-hate relationship with the USA. This quote keeps popping into my mind as I sit here and try to analyze our own relationship with Google:

“When you are compelled to sleep next to an elephant, you tend to sleep with one eye open. Every time the elephant decides to roll over, it affects your life.”

Advertise

As with any business, you must advertise. They say word of mouth is the best advertising. This may be true, but it is only useful if you have the patience to wait a hundred years or so for it to pay off. In the meantime, you’ll need another job. These are tongue-in-cheek statements, of course, but the intention is to remind you again that no matter how pretty your site is, no matter how scientifically it is monetized, it takes too long to make any money if you just sit back and wait for people to notice you and tell their friends about you.

Advertise. Be very proactive in this regard. Many things you do to get traffic to your site technically fall under the umbrella of advertising. When you strive to get people to link to you, is that not advertising? But what this post is about is direct advertising that you pay for. Generally this is in the category of pay-per-click advertising.

Whether you choose the most obvious, Google’s Adsense, or whether you choose another of the several very good other sources that have been springing up around the internet, you just need to do it. This generally involves setting up an advertising budget you can live with and bidding on keywords--words that describe the subject of your business. Then the advertising company can run your ad where it will be most effective.

How many other ways can you think of that come under the heading of advertising?

Titles of blog posts

One big way people find you is by typing in search terms in a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, so it is important that you set up your site in such a manner as to facilitate the search engines not only finding you, but in accurately defining your site’s subject matter.

People used to get very inventive in this regard, to the point of being deceptive. Running a blog, on the other hand, helps take care of this important function almost automatically. Over time, the many, many words you write in your blog help the search engine robots understand what you are all about more and more accurately. This is because key words and key phrases are repeated naturally in the flow of writing, without you having to contrive awkward sentences that contain keywords.

But you can still refine this. One way is to pay attention to the titles of your posts. Make them short and pithy and descriptive of what your post is about. I have a tendency to get cute, as if I were writing chapter titles in a book. When you are dealing with a robot, don’t get cute. Be simple and straightforward.

There are whole industries which have sprung up on the subject of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM.) That’s how important it is. If you are in business on the internet, keep the search engine robots always in your mind as you work on your site. Make working with search engines second nature.

Developing your blog's theme

After you decide upon a subject you are interested in, go ahead and start researching that subject on the Web and blogging about your findings. At the same time, begin working on your main website. This is the website whose domain name you own and is the place where you will be displaying your product reviews and product pictures.

Is it absolutely necessary to have two websites working in tandem like that?--both a blog and a “regular” website? Of course not. You can do it all with a blog alone if you are careful to keep it simple and straightforward. But if you choose to do it that way, please blog from your own website with your own domain name. You will be taken more seriously than if you “sub-blog” from a free blogging service, such as Google (blogspot) or the free version of Wordpress. Not that you can’t use Wordpress software and templates, for example, just do it from your own official website if you possibly can, instead of one of their free blogs.

Of course, even a free blog from Blogspot or Wordpress is better than doing nothing. Get up and get going! Get started today! But normally you will be using the free blogging services as “funnel sites” for your primary business sites. Nothing against Blogspot or Wordpress, obviously--I use them myself and they offer a great service. It’s just that you have more control over your destiny when you have your own “real” website.