Jeff Webb - Webbwords

I am fortunate to have been invited to host a roundtable discussion at the second session of the four-part seminar Changing Channels: Making the Switch to New Media Marketing. The event will be held Wednesday at Silverthorn Country Club beginning at 7:45 a.m.

The discussion I will facilitate is about a subject near and dear to my heart: The fundamentals of writing a blog for your business website. I spent most of my weekend putting the finishing touches on materials I will hand out to participants, and I am looking forward to their reaction to some of the mind-blowing statistics about how a well-written blog can increase traffic to your website.

Ran across a story today on the St. Petersburg Times Business Page that confirmed what professional online content writers have always known: the best way to move up your Website in search engine rankings is to provide well-written, relevant and regularly updated information.

The story does a good job of explaining how some search engine optimization companies, some reputable and some not, use questionable cyber-tactics in their attempts to outsmart the SEO experts at Google. The quick-fix strategies these SEO tricksters use include link-farming and keyword cloaking, which the Google "bots" have been clued into for several years. Companies that are talked into using those techniques see quick results, but once Google catches on to their ruse, their progress vanishes almost overnight.

Another SEO ploy is "content farming," where untrained writers post gibberish using keywords the bots are searching for, but with no regard for whether the content is even readable, much less relevant to the topic that the user is searching for. The team at Google, which frequently changes the algorithms it uses to rank Websites, is now stepping up its efforts to track down those phony wordsmiths and rightfully penalize their Websites.