Business Alone

As a solo Internet home business owner you are most likely the webmaster of your own web site.

Unless you have turned that function over to someone else (like your girl friend, your 2nd cousin "Harry," or the six year old next door), you will be in charge of optimizing your site for key words, meta tags, and other little HTML goodies that tell the search engines what your site is all about.

Many of us are in business to make money (imagine that . . .) and we certainly don't want to spend time fiddling around with such trivial matters as web site coding and search engine optimization. Right?

In a previous post, we talked about what meta tags are whether they're important to the search engines. We're going to continue that discussion here and add a few other thoughts.

As the Internet has become more crowded with e-commerce sites, the race to attract traffic through the free search engines has greatly intensified.

In fact, today it's all-out war when it comes to competing for top billing: the rush to grab the very highest search engine rankings for competitive key words that drive tons of traffic to the winners.

Blogs, like most every other type of Internet web site, gain value, grow, and even thrive when they are heavily viewed.

The more traffic a blog receives, the greater the chances for continued relevance and possible revenue generation.

Of course, money and income don't drive most blogs.

Typically bloggers are content with having their own soapbox to publish their opinions and feelings to the world (or at least those who care to visit.)

Bloggers are also finding that most search engines seem to like blogs. Why?

Anyone who is unfamiliar with web site development, search engine optimization, and all the technical terms and usage surrounding HTML and computer language is apt to be very confused by the existence of meta-tags and all the varied opinions about them.

What are they? Why are they important? How do you properly construct, place, and use them?

I am not an expert in this science by any means. In fact, I am one of the people that probably discount meta-tag usage to some extent.

In the previous post we began a discussion of the meta-tags - what they are, how they're used, why they're important, etc.

It was noted that there is an immense amount of discrepancy between the experts as to which tags are most critical, how they should be constructed, etc.

We began by talking about the title tag. We'll now continue with the discussion of the other two important tags.

One of the "tricks" of search engine optimization has to do with the way images are treated.

It might be a revelation to many site owners that are not familiar with the way the search bots work that images are not "read" like text on the page.

Images are not really "read" and therefore usually contribute nothing to the on-page SEO efforts of the webmaster.

Nevertheless, they can contribute to search engine ranking if they are optimized properly.

It's easy to find great detail on the subject if you simply go to Google and search on the phrase "optimize images."

Online business is a game of sorts. You are competing against others in your niche for customers and their dollars.

There are only so many "winners" in the game within a niche. When enough competing businesses divide up the available customer dollars, at times, the niche can become saturated with a excess number of players.

When the "pie" (customer purchases in a given niche and time period) or prize is divided up, too many sellers can mean a small share for each winner - sometimes not enough revenue to justify the work that is going into the business.

Of the many challenges that an online solo business owner faces in growing and maintaining a business, few are as exasperating as finding that previous work you have done has been wiped out (for some reason) through no fault of the owner.

Online business owners are in the game of creating enticing offers for their products and services (or affiliate products), driving web traffic to those offers, and hopefully converting the prospects who come to the offers into paying customers.