Joe Hayes {dot} Org

So you’ve started a blog? Congratulations, unfortunately though - if you build it, they will not come. Who’s they? Visitors, traffic, people coming to your website to read what’s on your mind. There are many things involved in the building of a successful blog, none more important than writing stuff people actually want to read.

On the homepage, one of the more effective places to implement Google Adsense is after the first post (same for any other archive type page, like the categories). While the CTR (click through rate) won’t be as high as placing the code above the first post, or after the first post title, it’s much cleaner and will provide a ‘less spammy’ place to put the code. Remember, folks are here for your content - not your ads.

For those not familiar with Netscape, the company garnered it’s popularity back in the mid 90’s with it’s web browser (Netscape Navigator), at the time the most commonly used version for web surfing. Navigator lost much of it’s market share after the first browser war with Microsoft, and Netscape was eventually purchased by AOL and have devoted themselves to improving the browser.

Simply put, a meta tag is information located between your head tags giving search engines more information about your web page. This isn’t viewable to a websurfer, however most web pages have at least some meta information and this can be seen by viewing a pages source code (right click, view source with internet explorer). When search engine bots (sometimes called spiders) come to your website, they use this meta information to help build their index of your web page. Typically, meta data looks like this:

Social Bookmarking is the craze right now. For web surfers they provide a convenient way to find intresting websites and valuable information that might have otherwise gone undiscovered. For webmasters, social bookmarking websites offer a huge potential for insane traffic and are a great viral marketing strategy. Below is a list I made for myself, feel free to use it.