Derrick Ng dot Com

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: 2% [?]

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: 2% [?]

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: 5% [?]

Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successful would always include the importance of generating traffic.

So, we all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful internet based business company. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your company’s internal organization well taken core of, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic.

If you already have a site and you want think that you’re not getting the traffic that you’re supposed to be getting, then its time to reconsider. If you are contending in these very competitive business, you should always be a step ahead of your competition, increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting yesterday.

Timing is essential, that’s an old adage known to everyone. But with generating traffic, you should always be on your toes and be a day ahead of everyone. Never think of today and tomorrow as a starting point for making your site traffic laden, it should always have been yesterday.

To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some seven surefire ways to increase your traffic starting from yesterday.

1) Invest in good advertising with search engines

Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture provide great advertising schemes that are very truly popular and assures great traffic. Although with this surefire way to increase your traffic would cost some money. While some would shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative in this case to do so because Adwords and Overture is the top surefire way to increase your traffic.

You could see for yourself the success this search engine advertising methods have reaped rewards for so many companies. Lots of site feature these advertising system and many have signed on to reap the benefits. Do not be left behind. Every penny is worth it with using Google and Yahoo’s advertising.

2) Exchange or Trade Links with other sites

With exchanging links with other sites, both of you will benefit from the efforts both of you do to enhance your sites traffic. When one site features another sites link, they could provide one another with the traffic one site generates. The efforts are doubly beneficial because it would seem like both of you are working to generate more traffic. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected.

3) Use Viral Marketing

Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any costs or if ever low costs only. This is a marketing method that can be quite sneaky; you can attach your company’s name, product or link to a certain media such as a funny video, entertaining game, an interesting article or a gossip or buzz. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium that they will pass it on to many people.

4) Search and use proper keywords or keyword phrases for your sites content

Search engines look for certain keywords that they would show in their results page. In doing so, having the right keyword and keyword phrase is a high requirement in ranking in high in search engine results. You could write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you.

5) Write Articles that can lead traffic to your site

Submit articles to sites that would contain the same subject that your site deals in. If you sell car parts write press releases and articles about cars and car parts. Attach your sites description and services at the end of the article as well as the link.

6) Join forums and form online communities

Capture a market and show your expertise and credibility. When you found a good foundation for your site, people will trust you and your site and will pass on to many people their trust. Traffic will certainly increase because they know that you can provide what they need.

7) Lastly, Offer newsletters.

If many people know what you are about and your existence is shared with many others, you will find a loyal traffic that can provide you with more traffic by recommendation. If you arouse the curiosity of your customers they would be pushed to help you with your traffic.

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There are probably ten million people online, looking for downloads at any given time. Of course, a lot of them could be looking for pornography or free software but still, reaching a minimum on a million people on any given day does offer some rather intriguing possibilities.

People like using file services to download music for two simple reasons, they’re free, and there is an incredible selection. The fact is Pandora’s Box has been opened. In Napster’s wake, other quasi-legal services quickly emerged… a lot of them. Even if they are closed, others will succeed them.

Major record companies would like to thing otherwise but they are never going to stop file sharing. Net users are file sharers…plain and simple. Long before the Internet came into being, people made cassette tapes of their favorite music for their friends…cd burners are so much easier and faster.

So how can you use this to help your viral marketing campaign along? Think about this. Once someone downloads your MP3 files and those files are available on that listener’s hard drive, viral marketing begins.

After two users start sharing your files, suddenly, your music is on the hard drive of a second computer…then a third… and on and on. When users are searching and they find your music on a lot of different computers, they are more likely to download the files. It’s just a matter of time before you’ll find your files showing up in more and more places.

No matter what genre music you play…Rock and Roll, Country, Tejano, Mozart sonatas, Heavy Metal, of Brazilian Jazz, there is an audience for it somewhere.

In this new paradigm, you aren’t hawking a product, you are offering free music via a medium that lets you be directly connected with your audience.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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