By Cody Moya


SEO. Keywords. Metatags. Metadescriptions. Spiders. Robots.

Do you feel overwhelmed when you hear people talking about all these
things? Most people do. Here's a quick glossary, and then the reason you
don't have to worry about these words if you know a couple of web
secrets.

- Metatags – Words embedded in your web page that tell viewers and
search engine automatons about the content on your page.

- Metadescriptions – Same as metatags, but in sentence form, and with
the possibility of being used on search engines as your site
description.

- Keywords – The words you use in your metas and in the text on your
page to describe your product or service.

- Spiders or Robots – miniprograms or automations sent out to
automatically browse the Web by search engines, they catalog your site by
keywords.

- SEO – Search Engine Optimization, this means your site has the
appropriate keywords and structure to be properly cataloged by those spiders
and robots.

Here's why this information isn't that important: it's archaic. Metas
were devised in the early days of the search engines, when they weren't
terribly powerful, so that your good content could be properly
referenced by the engines.

What they found was that unscrupulous webmasters loaded up the metas
with keywords that were popular and would rank well, but that really had
nothing to do with the content on the page. This is called search
engine spam because it works the same way and is approximately as useful.

Spiders today don't pay much attention to the metas. They look for
keywords in your content, and the most cutting-edge ones look for
grammatical structure as well.

It won't be long before they can tell whether your site is actually
sensible. And they are looking for web pages that are frequently updated,
not just static sites that contain the same information year in and
year out.

Interestingly, your customers are looking for good content as well. One
simple little trick can satisfy both of them inexpensively.

Good articles containing information about your product or service,
rotated regularly.

Drive Traffic with Great Content

Not everyone can write well enough to fulfill this requirement. And not
everyone has the time to sit and write these articles. For those who
can't, there are several options.

You can hire a professional writer to ghostwrite these articles for
you. This is an expensive and time-consuming prospect. Most writers charge
a minimum of $35 per hour, and web writers often charge much more.

And you'll have to sit with that writer, educate him or her on your
product or service, and ensure they're ready to tackle writing about it
before they start.

You can copy someone else's content with permission. This is an
interesting idea. There are a number of online databases that provide
pre-written articles optimized for your keywords, for free.

The hitch: you must also display a resource box on your website
referencing the original author of the article and providing a link back to
his or her page. This makes them into the expert, not you.

You can purchase keyword-optimized articles from an article broker like
www.YourOwnArticles.com . This is the happy medium. You have good
optimized articles, created for you by professional writers, published on
your site with your name, and costing you minimal cash because they are
mass-produced.

Using Article Directories for Your Purposes

But wait, there's more!

After you purchase articles to publish on your website with your name,
you can also buy extras to publish to article directories. Not
everyone's going to be as smart as you about how they put content on their
site.

Many will instead take the easy way, and download those free articles
to publish, with resource boxes, to their own website.

If they download your articles, those resource boxes will point to your
website. In essence, you can direct traffic from your competitors and
from those who provide similar or complementary products and services to
you, straight to your own website. And you can do it for free, after
the cost of the article.