By Mark Daoust

How do you hide a tree? Put it in a forest.

This is what many authors have effectively done when they suggest that you should use articles to promote your website. The technique that these authors suggest can be summarized as follows: write something you know about, add your resource box, submit your article to tens of thousands of frëe reprint directories and distribution groups, and wait for publishers to pick up your article.

But this is entirely the wrong method.

If you were to follow the advice of these authors you may see some traffïc, receive a few inbound links, and gain some publicity for your website, but how does this make writing articles different from any other basic promotion technique? Rather than writing an article to bring in this traffïc, why not just participate in forums, submit to niche directories, or pay for quality traffïc? Articles can do so much more.

Why The Current Thought is Bad

Ask yourself this question: what are publishers looking for? If you said content, you are wrong. Publishers (or at least publications worth reading) are not looking for just content – they are looking for original content. They do not want an article that is going to show up on 500 other websites, including frëe reprint directories. They want an article that people will link to, that only they offer. It is their unique content that will allow them to separate themselves from their competition.

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By Akash Kumar

As with many other things which are unseen, there is a lot of unnecessary mystery surrounding the use of meta-tags on web pages. The meta tags are information packets in the head portion of a web page.

Though there are several possible meta tags that may be included in the head of a web page, the ones which are most important for search engine optimization are the Title Tag, the Description tag and the Keywords tag.

The title tag is really one of the most important single things you can work on for improving your website’s search engine results. Go to Google and make a search for any particular key word If you look at the top ten entries in that search you will see that all of them have this key word in the title, sometimes more than once. So when writing your title tag, it is helpful to have your keywords included in the title tag, and not only in the tag, near the beginning of the title.

Suppose that your company is the Acme Manufacturing Company and you are selling electric widgets and you are located in California. What should your title tag be? Most people would opt for the name of their company as the first word of the title. It makes sense, in that it looks good in the blue strip at the top of the browser, but it doesn’t necessarily help you to get a good ranking in search results for your keywords “electric widgets, California”.

The first few words of your title tag are very important. People may not be searching for Acme Manufacturing, unless it is a very important brand, but they are searching for electric widgets, and they may not want to purchase it from someone in New York, especially if it is not a mail-order type item.

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By Adriana Iordan (c) 2006

For a successful Search Engine Optimization strategy, take into consideration that search engines look at content and also at the structure of the markup. They emphasize the importance of text content, page titles, keywords rich text, meta descriptions and information architecture. A website where quality of content and code prevails will rank higher in the major search engines.

There are many Search Engine Optimization tactics, but try to find the best combination and don’t sacrifice the usability and performance of your website. Here is some basic information about improving your source code from an SEO perspective:

Avoid Classical 404 Error Pages

The 404 - File Not Found - page is presented to the user by the server as an error page. The user gets this message directly from the server of the website he is trying to visit. This error page is supposed to appear only when the server cannot find the requested location and is unsure of its status.

In the vast majority of cases, the 404 error emerges for pages that were moved or even deleted or the layout of the site or page information changed.

Many hostíng companies offer a 404 redirect page. This means that when a user enters the URL of any page of your domain, and that page does not exist or can no longer be found, you can automatically redirect the user to a specified page - usually your home page or your sitemap.

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I know many aspiring web entrepreneurs face this dilemma all the time: should I build a single site that makes me $200 a day from Adsense or 200 smaller (mini) sites that each makes just $1 a day?

The truth is, it’s not that easy to have a site that makes $1 a day. You can’t spend just 20 minutes setting up a made-for-adsense site, submit it to the search engines, and expect it to earn $1 a day for the rest of your life. More likely, the site will languish in cyberspace, earning a few pennies here and there, but it will never get enough visitors to average $1 a day. To have a site that makes $1 a day requires a fair amount of content-building and promotion. That’s not even to mention the costs of registering, renewing, and hosting 200 domain names.

Most of us will probably end up doing something in between– building a handful of quality sites that can be maintained and promoted on a regular basis. It would help to focus on topics that interest you, so that the tasks of content- and link-building will not become too much of a burden.

The bottom line: whether you decide to build one big site or 200 minisites to earn $200 a day from Adsense, don’t expect it to be a cakewalk. It’s getting tougher and tougher these days to make money through contextual advertising networks like Adsense and YPN. But then again, I know people — too bad I’m not one of them– who are raking in over $10,000 a month from Adsense. These success stories are a great source of inspiration (if not income) to me.