229 Characters to Article Summary Fame

Posted on February 16th, 2009

When you write a page or post in WordPress, you have the option to also write a short summary, known as an Excerpt. That summary is used by those who follow your blog and by Google Alerts. How you write the title and summary will help determine how many readers will see that article.

Most news readers allow showing only the post summary instead of the entire article. That feature allows busy people to see what your article is about before loading the entire page in their reader or browser.

If you have your site set up to alert the article and news directories each time you post a page or article, Google Alerts will find you. When they do, the title, author and summary are shown to those who watch for certain keywords. The title is linked to your artile.

When writing the summary, keep the number 229 in mind. That is the maximum number of characters Google uses to display your summary in the alerts they send out. Writing your most compelling introduction in that summary will determine whether people will click to your site.

Skip writing a summary at your peril. I missed writing a summary a few times, thinking that Google would list the first paragraph like it does in the search engine listings. That is not true for news and blogs alerts. Without a summary, 229 characters of your navigation menu will be used for the description.

If you use Yahoo! Alerts, you are limited to 82 characters. You also have to tell Yahoo! which sites you want to monitor, instead of simply watching for keywords like you do with Google.

The title is most important, followed by the summary. Write both well and you can increase your readership within 24 hours. If you time it right, you could see your news item announced within 20 minutes in Google Alerts.

Filed under SEO | 3 Comments »

Smart YouTube Makes Adding Videos Easy

Posted on February 10th, 2009

What would you rather do: Read a long article, or watch a video? Watching a video can be more informative, entertaining and easier than reading. Many people do not know how to get the video into their web page or blog. In this article, I will show you how easy it can be to add a video to your blog.

First though, we should discuss where to get the video you will use. If you create your own, then you are ahead of the game. What if you are camera shy or do not know how to create a video? What if you want to update your blog, but ran out of ideas? In either case, YouTube is your friend.

The idea is to search YouTube for a video that is related to the topic of interest. When watching it, there will be two links on the side: one to link directly to the video and one to embed it into your web page or blog.

The most common way to embed the video is to copy the code to embed the video, create a new article or page in WordPress, click the Source button (or HTML depending on which editor you use) and paste the code in. Save your settings and preview the page.

An easier method is to download a WordPress plugin named Smart YouTube.
Smart Youtube is a Wordpress Youtube Plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in your post, comments and in RSS feed. The main purpose of the plugin is to correctly embed youtube videos into your blog post. The video will be shown in full in your RSS feed as well.

Once you activate the plugin and setup the basic options, adding videos is so easy, you may never use the embed code again. Instead, you will get the link, paste it into your page where you want the video to show, change http:// to httpv:// (add a “v” to it) and publish the page. Using this plugin you will not even have to mess with the source code.

Oh yeah, you can even delay the auto-start so the video will play automatically after a set time delay that you choose. To activate that option, add a simply add &start=10 to the end of the video link. Change 10 to the number of seconds to delay.

• Easily embeds YouTube videos into your WordPress blog
• Supports latest high quality video protocols (360p and HD quality 720p)
• Allows full YouTube customization (colors, border, full screen…)
• Supports video deep linking (starting at desired point with &start=time parameter)
• Works on iPod and iPhone
• Provides a sidebar widget for videos
• Produces xHTML valid code
• Very fast and light, with no extra scripts needed

Install Smart YouTube and start adding videos to your posts today.

Tags: video marketing, videos, WordPress plugins, YouTube
Filed under WordPress | 2 Comments »

Wild SEO Review

Posted on January 6th, 2009

Wild SEO - Search Domination & Auto-Pilot Wealth Building

Stories sell and funny stories sell more because the humor draws more attention. One of the funnier stories I have read lately is on the Wild SEO sales page. Ben Cooper and Chris Wilson were once rivals, until that fateful night in a strip club when a fight broke out.

Read the page. Do not just skim it, or you will miss out on the story. These guys are comical and write in a conversational tone. Both give their side of the story of the fight and their time in jail. That time drew those two SEO gurus together so all they really fight over now is how to spend the money. It is comical how they put it all together. Check it out.

I purchased the book and read it all the way through. Having been doing Search Engine Optimization almost since I started building websites, most of the book was a review for me.

There are a few tidbits that could prove worthwhile though, including references to resources I did not know about. It starts from the basics of SEO and continues on with more in-depth practices.

Wild SEO will show you:

• How to Set up your website so the search engines like you
• How to get more incoming links for more popular sites
• Which search engines really matter and which ones are secondary
• How to get your site listed in the search engines fast
• What the search engines look for in ranking websites
• Making sure your website is useful to others - it is not what you think!
• The importance of proper keyword research
• Getting the site content - when to write it yourself, buy it or have someone else write it for you
• Linking strategies for building incoming links that build your search engine popularity and Google PageRank.

Once you order, you will get access to the members area. In there you will not only download the Wild SEO Ebook, but you should brace yourself for information overload.

There are so many other resources, training guides, Ebooks and audio interviews with top marketers, that it can take you a week just to read and listen to all of them. Those resources are normally sold online, but given to you free with your purchase.

For those who are just starting with website marketing, or want to increase your SEO skills, I recommend Wild SEO as a guide to get you going.

Get Wild SEO today and increase your search engine listings fast.

Tags: Google PageRank, search engine optimization, SEO
Filed under SEO | No Comments »