Jennifer Horowitz

Newsletters help establish your credibility, keep you top of mind for your prospects and allow you to make special offers to your list. Please note a paid newsletter needs to be informative and doesn't always offer the same sales opportunities. However a freebie newsletter can have ads, special offers and promotions and more.

Below are some of the crucial items you should have on your Blog. Take a look at this list and your Blog and see how you measure up. I can tell you that I did it myself and I had to create an action plan to fix my own Blog.

What you need to know is that people tend to shop differently in a poor economy. They research more, they comparison shop more and they look for more value for the money they spend.

When it comes to setting up your Blog, there are many options and it's enough to drive you crazy. Here is some information for each option...

I've already written about why it's important to write articles, and it seems a lot of you agree because I keep getting emails saying that you want to write articles but don't know what to write about.

Many people insist there is no penalty (except Exclusion for really blatant "Black Hat" techniques), and rather it is all about Filters. If you do something that triggers a filter your site won't rank as highly. Whether you call it a filter or a penalty, the results are the same. If you don't follow best practices, sooner or later your site will be penalized or filtered out of the top rankings.

Think of the engines like teachers handing out gold stars for everything that you do well. Google currently has about 200 factors in their algorithms that determine how your site will rank. Imagine your teacher with a clipboard and checklist with 200 items on it and she assigns you gold stars for each of the things you do well.

Put simply, a keyword is a single word, like "Maui." But a keyword phrase is a more descriptive string of two or more words, like "Maui vacations." Your approach to keyword selection will vary, depending on your industry. For certain niche markets, using single words can be a good strategy (as long as they are specific to your product or service). But regardless of your industry...

The cold, hard truth is that if you're not successfully optimizing your site (and if it's not search engine friendly), you're losing hundreds and thousands of hits from the very people you most want to visit your site - people who demonstrate a serious desire for what you have to offer, by proactively typing keywords related to YOUR business into the engines.

Since you want the engines to be able to spider all of your content pages, you should minimize the amount of extraneous code that is on your page. You worked hard to create your content and get your site optimized, so the last thing you want to do is take a chance that the engines won't want to spider your pages.