There are very precise challenges in writing for the Web, wholly separate from making sure your writing is concise and economical. There is the matter of clarity, which can both be sacrificed in an attempt at artificial wordiness, as well as an attempt at brevity.

And while brevity may be a writer’s best friend, it must not come at the expense of clear writing. What good is a message, after all, if no one can understand it? Throw in the added troubled of keywords and targeting for search engine optimization, and it becomes even more difficult to make sure you’re getting your point across.

If you are looking for some ways to inject life into your Web writing and still keep an audience, you’ve come to the right place. Here are five great ways to clean up those articles and keep your readership coming back for more.

#1. Keep It Truthful. You might think-what does telling the truth have to do with writing clearly? But it actually has a lot to do with it. We have a tendency to ‘overthink’ and overwrite things when we don’t know what we’re talking about, or when we know what we’re saying is BS. Your audience will know it, too. Whenever possible, stick to what you know, and stick to what’s true.

#2. Get To The Point Already! A lot of writers have a tendency to fall in love with their words as they flow onto the page. Those rich phrases and words may be great for that 18th century potboiler you’ve got cooking, but they won’t do you any good when writing for the Web. Surfers, potential buyers, and your normal, everyday readers don’t want to be bothered and taxed by flowery, incomprehensible drivel.

If you have a word sitting in your article that you haven’t heard used in speech in the last week, chances are you can find a better word. Your writing will be the clearer for it, and therefore better.

#3. Keep Your Writing Edgy. This doesn’t mean you have to start peppering your articles with four letter words or controversial opinions on the Holocaust. It just means making sure what you’re writing is something that hasn’t been said already, most likely a million and one times. If you’re bored writing it, chances are the reader will be bored reading it.

#4. Make Sure You Do HAVE a Point. If you’re one of those writers who likes to get off on tangents that have little relevance to the thrust of your article, it’s time to nip that particular bad habit in the bud. It might be fine for the first draft, but it won’t do for the final copy. While we’re on the subject. . .you are writing at least two drafts, right? Right?

#5.Summarize. This is an easy one, but it’s something missing from more web articles than you’d believe. You’ve brought the reader all this way, so don’t leave them hanging at the end of the article. Let them know why they just read what they read. Make them understand why it’s important. Otherwise, they might think you just wasted their time, and that’s not good for repeat readership.

So, speaking of summaries, that’s about it. Writing for the Web has a plethora of advantages over writing for print mediums. You can turn a concept into an article in a day, and have people reading it tomorrow. But there are other differences as well, and that includes the style of writing.

Make sure you understand those differences, and apply the rules above to your writing. Your readers will thank you, and your writing will intrinsically improve.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Writing for the Web can be difficult in many ways. Readers want their information quickly, and they want it, by and large, in bite-sized morsels rather than long, buffet type spreads. This can make the art of being clear even more difficult than it might be in other mediums.

If you write for the Web and have struggled with clarity, here are five tips to keep you on the right track, and make sure you don’t lose your audience in between the lines.

#1. Keep It Simple. This one is often easier to say than to do. But it is probably the most important aspect of writing clearly for the Web. If you’re a writer, chances are you love the English language. You probably read three or four novels a month (at least) and love to spin beautiful, melodious phrases that make the mundane special. That makes the ordinary sound magnificent. You love to use words that will send the average reader scratching their head, looking for context clues, or running for the dictionary. If this describes you, it’s time to bring it back down to earth.

#2. Keep It Moving. As was pointed out, readers on the Web are constantly looking for the next page. They want to keep moving, so your writing must do the same or you’ll lose them. If you have something to say, say it directly. Don’t take the long way around, through the roses and around the koi pond in the back. Just go straight there and back.

#3. Use All The Tools At Your Disposal. This means pictures, video, clip art, links, and so on. If you have a picture you need your audience to imagine, by all means-show them the picture! If you have a website you want them to visit, give them a link. This is what the internet is about. It’s a multimedia experience and should be used as such.

#4. Repetition Is Your Friend. Of course, no one wants to read the same thing over and over again. Of course no one wants to read the same thing over and over again. See? But still, it doesn’t hurt to repeat the key concepts in your writing a few times to make sure they hit the mark. This is frowned upon in so-called “higher writing” as using a sledgehammer when you should be using an artist’s brush, but the Web calls for cruder tools. Don’t be afraid to use them.

#5. Put It Another Way. When you write a piece, read it over. Let’s say you used an example or two along the way to illustrate your point. Think about what percentage of your audience is likely to understand your point by way of your example. If it’s not close to 100%, think about using a second example. It can’t hurt, and you can be more confident in the percentage of your audience you’ll reach.

Writing for the Web isn’t always easy, but reading what you’ve written should be. Put these five tips to use in your writing, and you can be sure no reader will ever slip away from your website scratching their heads and looking for the dictionary.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Twitter ( www.twitter.com ) is a social networking tool that is attracting new members daily. Twitter is free, quick and necessary for your blogging success. Short messages (called “tweets”) are sent to your followers when you choose to send them.

I use Twitter to promote my blogs and to find other people who share my interests. I have used Twitter to revive dead blogs and to jumpstart new ones. You can’t beat Twitter when it comes to getting instant traffic to your blog (when you use it right).

Here are 6 tips to get your blog busy:

1. Connect and network with others that share your interests. This can help with link exchanges or getting traffic for your blog. Use the “search” feature and find others that are tweeting about things that interest you or are relevant to your blog topic. Follow them and they will most likely follow you back. (I spend about 20 minutes a day searching for and following people.)

2. Be unique and give value to the Twitter community. Let your personality show in what you say, and also let it show in your blog. You also need to be careful of what you tweet – one tweet rattled off in anger can truly damage your reputation and make you lose followers.

3. Promote your Twitter link. Many people use Twitter, so simply put your link in email signatures and in forum signatures – your list of followers will grow quickly. I have found that putting a Twitter link in your forum signature and then giving informative posts in a forum will guarantee people will follow you.

4. Be consistent with your tweets, but not too chatty. I make sure I send out tweets at least a few times a week – less on weekends, more during the week – and I don’t get too talkative. I want people to look forward to my tweets, not groan when they see I have said something new.

5. Ask good questions. Asking a thought-provoking or controversial question with a link to your blog is a great way to get people to participate. Make sure you suggest in your tweet that people answer the question by making a comment on your blog. If you have a poll, send a tweet announcing the results – along with another link to your blog.

6. Be generous when you tweet. Become an asset to the Twitter community. Along with promoting your blog, make sure you participate in the other activity going on by answering questions and commenting on other blogs. I always answer any replies I have to something I post. I also ask questions or congratulate people when their tweets warrant it. It helps me be a welcome addition to the Twitter community.

Twitter is a great tool that can produce fast results when used properly – so get started now!

You may want to follow me on twitter !

Popularity: 16% [?]

Affiliate marketing is an Internet-based form of marketing involving three parties:

1. A merchant/product seller
2. An affiliate of the merchant
3. The customer

The role of the affiliate marketer is to act as ‘middle man’ between the customer and the merchant by ‘preselling’ that potential customer on the merchant’s product before referring him to the merchant’s web site.

Affiliate marketing can also be viewed as a form of advertising and traffic generation. Typically, the affiliate uses his own (or another) web site in order to drive traffic to the merchant’s web site.
So, what’s the benefit in all of this to the affiliate?

Affiliates get paid commissions for their referrals. Any time an affiliate sends a paying customer through his affiliate link, he earns a commission in the form of a percentage of the sale.

For example, let’s say you referred a customer to a merchant’s web site and that customer purchased a $150 product on which you earn a 50% commission per sale. You would make a profit of $75, plus or minus any expenses you laid out on advertising.

How does affiliate marketing benefit the customer?

Some people dislike the idea of affiliate marketing because they are averse to the idea of a stranger earning a profit off the purchase. However, when done correctly, affiliate marketing benefits the customer in several ways and the affiliate’s commission is well deserved.

First, an affiliate can introduce a potential customer to solutions he might not have discovered on his own.

Second, the affiliate often provides an extra layer of information to the potential customer, which helps ease the buying process.

Lastly, some affiliates are able to work out exclusive deals with their affiliated merchants, allowing them to pass discounts along to their customers.

The most important thing to know about affiliate marketing, however, is that it can form the basis of a very rewarding and successful home-based Internet business. So, if you like the idea of becoming an affiliate, continue to explore the subject. It just might be the business opportunity you’ve been waiting for!

Popularity: 13% [?]

“In a world where everyone is obsessed by self image and looks, looks matter“ !

 And yes, people really do judge a book by it’s cover..

This really cool software will quickly and easily transform your images into 3d eCovers that will make your website look like a million bucks!

Who else wants to create amazing ecovers directly from their PC under 3 minutes with just afew mouse clicks to skyrocket their product sales by at least 72% !!

Popularity: 13% [?]

Popularity: 17% [?]

What’s in a Search Engine?

To effectively optimize for search engines and to better understand
what’s really happening, there is value in knowing how modern search
algorithms work. This article will walk through the creation of a
hypothetical search engine, and will show how this impacts search
engine optimization.

Step One: Make a List of URLs and Crawl Them

Before anything can be done, a list of URLs needs to be retrieved to
initially crawl. The most popular option for this is to load the URLs in
the DMOZ database. These aren’t the only sites that will be crawled.
The pages linked to by sites in the DMOZ directory are also crawled
since the crawler follows the links. It certainly helps to be in DMOZ,
especially if you don’t have enough links from other sites to be sure
that you’ll be sufficiently crawled.
Now, a group of computers are set up to download all of the pages on
the list. These are called the “crawlers.” They will also look at the links
on those pages, and crawl those URLs as well (the crawlers will
continue following links until their hard drives are full).

Step Two: Analyze the Pages
The crawlers now go through each page and look at their content.
First, the crawler makes a table with every unique word on the page.
It gives “points” to each word based on how many times it’s used on
the page, and words in bold, in the title, in meta tags, or in headers
are given extra points.

Word         Points
shoes               145
athletic           78
sneakers        34
sandals           12

        
This means that you should use the most important words more often
in your text. However, using a word too often will mark your page as
being spam, which will cause the crawler to delete your site from its
database.

It then creates a percentage of the frequency of each term:

Word      Points      Percentage
shoes           145           5.80%
athletic      78             3.12%
sneakers   34              1.36%
sandals      12               0.48%

Usually, the percentages are stored in the database and not the actual
points, though longer pages may be given a slight advantage later on.
As a result, adding a lot of unnecessary text that uses one term a lot
will raise your percentage for that term, but will also lower the
percentage for other terms.

More advanced engines will also cross-reference each word to other
major words based on where they are relative to each other. (Words
appearing next to each other are given more points here.) So, for example:

Word           shoes      athletic      sneakers      sandals
shoes                -                20                    12                  7
athletic           20               -                      11                  4
sneakers         12             11                      -                     5
sandals             7               4                       5                   -

As a result, the placement of words relative to each other does matter.
This is why targeting phrases is usually better than targeting a variety
of single words.

Calculate Link Popularity
The crawlers now take their lists of the URLs that each page links to
and combine them. So for each page there is now a list of the links on
it, as well as the text of each link. The list is then reversed, so that
instead of showing the links on each page, it shows for each page the
sites that link to it.

Some search engines stop here and simply store the number of links
pointing to a given page, but Google takes it a little further.
For every page in its database, Google gives it “points” based on how
many links are going to it–just like any other search engine. Then, it
re-calculates the number of links pointing to each page, but gives
more points to links that had a higher point-value themselves in the
first count. It then repeats the process about 100 times, each time
making the points more accurate. So:

1. Points are assigned based on the number of links going to a
page.

2. Points are calculated again, but pages get more points if the
links going to a page had more points in the last step. (Because
Yahoo! had a lot of links going to it in the first step, a link from
Yahoo! would now be more valuable.)

3. The original point values are thrown out and are replaced with
the points just calculated. Now, the points are re-calculated
again, this time considering the points from Step 2 instead of
Step 3. This is repeated approximately 100 times, and every
time the points become more accurate (because it considers
further down the line where links are coming from).

Now, Google takes the point values–which could be extraordinarily
large–and converts them to a PageRank, which is on a scale of 0 to
10. However, it does not simply convert, for example, 1,000 to 1 and
2,000 to 2. The scale is logarithmic, which means that higher
PageRanks require much more points.

Webmaster Goodies has an approximation of what the ranges most
likely are–look at the first three columns. The actual ranges aren’t
available to the public, but the ranges on that site are believed to be
fairly close. Obviously, a logarithmic scale makes a difference: PR1
requires 6 to 30 “points,” while PR10 requires more than 25 million
points.

Now What ?

Search engines put the databases into a specialized format, and then
write the search software.

When a search is made, every site containing the relevant terms is
pulled up. The ranking is based on a combination of the points for each
relevant term, the site’s link popularity (PageRank), and other smaller
factors. Each engine weighs these differently.

You should now have a better understanding of what’s happening
under the hood of the search engine, and this should help in
optimizing your pages as well.

Popularity: 19% [?]

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Experience the tranquillity of countryside living in the rustic setting of D’Kranji Farm Resort. The Singapore’s first and currently “one and only” Agri-tainment farm, located in Lim Chu Kang area. This is the exact place for anyone wanting to escape from hustle and bustle of the city life and to pamper yourself, to relax, to rest.

Luxury accomodation, scenic views, peaceful surroundings and farm stay experience, it’s all part of what makes D’Kranji Farm Resort a unique and pleasant retreat. Facilities available include lifestyle spa centre, shopping at retail kiosks, dining with Chinese, Malay and Indian gastronomic delights( Restaurant offers seafood including chilli crab and local cuisine as well as fried black pepper kuey teow and coffee pork ribs).

Popularity: 27% [?]

Popularity: 17% [?]