It’s true that your homepage is usually the most powerful page on your site, but try to keep focused on one or two keywords. By adding additional keywords, you are diluting the actual theme of that page and may not rank for any of the keywords you’re trying for anyway.

Instead, use interior pages as focused, relevant landing pages. So, instead of placing Drama DVD’s in the title of the homepage, save it for www.nameofyoursite.com/drama-dvds. Of course, this is just a rule of thumb. It’s not necessarily wrong to add DVD genres to your title tag, but just be careful. Feel free to go nuts with the meta-keywords tag. This is a great place to add some of these keywords that you don’t necessarily want in the title tag.

This makes sense in the search engines if you think about it. If I’m specifically looking for Drama DVD’s, I would rather be taken to the Drama DVD page versus your homepage, in which I would have to click to get to the content I want to see.
 

rel="nofollow" is an attribute that you can add to links on a web page. It goes inside of an "a tag." Example - <a href="http://www.yoursite.com" rel="nofollow">Name of link</a>. What the rel="nofollow" does is tell crawlers, like google, not to follow this link. When that happens, you aren’t passing any of the popularity of your page to that link. This is very helpful for links to contact pages or other pages that you are not trying to rank in the search engines. In other words, you might as well pass the value of your page to other pages that you feel are important - and want to optimize for search engines.

Link juice or popularity is basically how powerful your page is according to the search engines. If Google thinks your page is very important, then it has quite a bit of link juice. You can pass that link juice to other pages on your site, or out to other sites. You want to point that link juice to places where it can help you, therefore, adding a rel="nofollow" to pages like About Us and Contact Us makes sense. Why waste any juice on those pages when you can increase the juice that goes to more valuable interior pages. 

5. Hey Whipple, Squeeze This

3. The Brand Gap

4. Made to Stick 

2. Copywriters Handbook

1. Ogilvy on Advertising

Happy reading. Please leave comments with other useful books. I’d love to hear some suggestions. 

The first thing you need to do is set up an account. Go to www.google.com/analytics/ to get things started. Once you’ve created an account, you simply add a snippet of code to the html pages of your site. The code should be placed just above the closing body tag (</body>) and must be added to all pages that you would like to be tracked.

Now your finished! You can login to your account whenever you get an itch to see how well your site is doing. You’ll see loads of information as in how many people are visiting your site, what pages they are viewing, how they are getting to your site, and much more.

Now that you have a Google account, you can use it for other great tools they offer. Two others that I often use and suggest you do the same are AdSense and the Google Toolbar. AdSense allows you to make money off of banners on your site. The Google Toolbar has great stuff on it, like the PR checker, which I will discuss in an upcoming post. Until then… 

The company was started by Dusty Davidson and Kevin Zink, two young and intelligent programmers that had enough with corporate life. If you’re in need of web 2.0 software development, these are your guys. They bring a fresh and accurate point of view on what users expect to find on the web.

Guerilla advertising is a relatively untapped way of advertising that does just this. Guerilla advertising is the art of advertising in unconvential ways. The best guerilla advertising is original and effective. I found some solid examples of guerilla advertising online today. These should give you an idea of what has been done and hopefully get your creative juices flowing.

Until next time.