I recommended that you get a Blog and link back and forth to your website. Combining a blog and a website is an effective way of generating traffic.

What is a Blog? A Blog, or a Web Log, is an online diary where you can post your thoughts and keep it as a private journal or you can place it where your readers can get together and place entries. When blog first came, it was adopted by teenagers and later by adults to write about their daily lives. Then writers and journalist entered the blog world writing about books and investigative reports. But, there’s a few people invented “Business Blog”.

Suddenly blogs started appearing on business websites all over the Internet after people discover search engine like Google and Yahoo were displaying blogs. The impact was huge. As a result, people starting creating blogs hopping to get more prospective customers to visit their websites.

1. User Friendly

Blogs are easy to update and are automatically formatted as you upload them. The easiest way to get started is to create a free account in http://www.blogger.com. Blogger is part of Google and it offer dozens of templates which you can customize by changing layouts and colors. It allows you to publish your blog without the need to know about HTML or FrontPage and FTP etc… All you need to do is write your own content.

2. Create Discussions & Write Honest Reviews

Having your own business blog allows you to create discussion about the program or products that you are selling and list any updates to your regular website. You need to know your products andpreferable use it yourself so that you can write honest review about it. What better way to promote a product and get people to believe it’s great than to say you use it too? In other words, it enables you to interact with your prospects. Blogs have a comment function which allows your customers and prospects to post their thoughts and opinions. As a result, your potential customers will have more trust and confidence in your products or services.

3. Increase Search Engine Ranking

Search engines love blogs because they are frequently updated with fresh new content. Compared to new sites, active blogs are indexed quicker by many search engines. After the blog is indexed, the pages you have linked to the blog will also get indexed. The more frequently you update your site, the more frequently your blog will get indexed, and this helps to boost your search engine rankings. If you make regular postings to your blog, you can be sure the search engine will visit your blog again and again.

4. RSS Feed

Most blogging service providers have RSS (Real Simple Syndication) built-in. Readers can even subscribe to RSS which notifies them your new posting in your blog. This allow others to publish your feed on their sites and gain more free exposure and traffic to your site.

About the Author

Bibi Liew is the owner of http://www.ebusiness-insights.com
Visit her website for A Step-By-Step Guide To Start an Online Business,
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400 Days Ezine-In-A-Box. Don’t miss it!

Meta Tags Explained

Meta Tags are used to describe information about the document to search engine robots, browsers and other automatic programs. Here we will examine the most important Meta tags and how to create them. Although they are not difficult to create manually there are tools available for generating and checking Meta Tags that make it easier for those not familiar with HTML.

Meta tags are contained between the tags near the top of the page and are invisible to the end user. Although there are many meta tags we really only need to concern ourselves with the 4 commonly used tags:

Title
Description
Keywords
Robots

Title Tag
Although not strictly speaking a meta tag, the title tag is the most powerful tag for search engine optimisation hence it is considered here. Text you place in the title tag appears in the top bar of the Web browser and is usually the first line displayed by search engines. Because of its importance to search engines the title tag should contain your keywords and should reflect accurately what the page is about The recommended length is 5-8 words.

Use:

Description Tag
The page description should accurately describe your Web page and is usually displayed by the search engines along with the title. The description should be less than 200 characters and ideally less than 140 characters. It should contain one or two of you keyword/keyword phrases with the most important one appearing near the beginning.

Use:

Example:

Keywords Tag
This tag was previously used by search engines to determine page relevancy it is no longer used by the major engines. The tag is a list of keywords and phrases. Each Keyword or keyword phrase is separated by a comma.

Try to limit the length to about 10 words, less is usually better. Don’t be tempted to enter 100’s of keywords just because you are allowed. Don’t repeat your keyword more than 3 times as some search engines and indexes will penalise you for spamming.

Use:

Example:

Robots Tag
The robots tag is not normally used. It is used to tell search engines how to index the Web Page. Web pages will be indexed by search engines unless explicitly being told not to. Normally you will want your page to be indexed by the search engines and hence you will not need to include this tag. Include the tag only when you want to stop a Web page being indexed.

Use:

Meta Tags Example

Meta tag Generator

Although it is very easy to create your own Meta tags most Web page editors have a built in meta tag generator so that you don’t need to enter the HTML yourself. If yours doesn’t then there are several free online meta tag generators that you can use. You simply fill out an on line form and the HTML code is created for you. All you then need to do is to copy and paste the code into your Web page ( while the editor is displaying HTML).

http://www.scrubtheWeb.com/abs/builder.html

http://www.mystiblue.com/meta_tag_generator.htm

Meta tag Checker

To ensure your Meta Tags are correctly formatted before you submit them then use the CSE HTML validator tool or Trellian Code pad. They will check the HTML on your Web page including the Meta tags. There are online tools available if the page you want to check is already online.

http://www.scrubtheWeb.com/abs/meta-check.html

Website Ranking/Position and Meta Tags

Although not all search engines make use of the Meta Tags in the same way Meta Tags are still important for achieving a good website ranking. As it is a difficult an time consuming process of tracking which search engine uses what Tag and the importance it places on that tag then simply assume they all use them equally and make the best use of them. Please don’t leave them blank!