Well, now that I’ve bared a bit of my soul for you all to see, I’m not sure where to go next.

When I wrote the post on Friday about my ‘Gotta Get Goals,’ I didn’t realize it would have such an effect. Not only on you, by your comments – which I thank you for, but on me as well. Over the weekend and into today I’m a little foggy on how I want to proceed.

I’ll certainly continue blogging about small business development, marketing, using the web, blogging, etc. And, it feels right to begin doing so with even more of my own, unique perspective.

When I work with clients, it’s never just about business building. It’s much more. Often I share with my clients how to bring themselves more forward in their business. Not just ‘own,’ but how to bring more of their own, authentic selves forward in caring for their clients and customers.

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Do you find it hard to write sometimes? You sit there at the keyboard and just can’t get the words to come out. Or maybe you’re like me, you begin a post, then delete it. Begin again, delete it. Begin again, rewrite it, then delete it. And so on.

Sure, sometimes the posts just coming flying out – like this one. But sometimes it’s a struggle to get anything down at all.

It’s probably true that anyone who writes deals with writer’s block from time to time. But what do you do when it comes knocking on your door? Or worse, when it makes itself at home, follows you to your office and sits on your lap all day?
Well, Bestseller Interviews has put together The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Writer’s Block. And they should know. Bestseller Interviews covers “Best Selling Authors and How to Write Best Selling Books.” So if anyone would know how to deal with writer’s block, they should.
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Part 4 of my comments on a really good post from ProBlogger written by Tony Hung of DeepJiveInterests about what he calls “the five prerequisites for having a successful blog.” Realize It’s Not About You (its About Them).

…Certainly the kind of blogging you want to do is not about you at all. Its about Them. I’ve alluded to it plenty of times in this very article, but blogs that are successful, popular, and growing are not ones centered around their authors. They are centered around news and information that is interesting to their readership.

But what does this also mean? It means ask yourself and Them, how you can make yourself better to serve their interests. It means, changing your content to make it wildly interesting to Them. It means ask yourself if the next Big Change your going to do on your blog will cheese them off or encourage more feed signups.
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I had some time over the holidays to think about the past year; the projects I’ve worked on, the people I’ve worked with and many of the conversations I’ve had. It’s been a great year and I thank you for that.

As I looked back over past conversations and one-on-one consultations, I’m struck with the overwhelming amount of misinformation about search engines. And unless you’re following current trends closely, you’d have no idea if what you’re being told is accurate or not.

Probably the biggest piece of misinformation “out there” right now is about keywords – how they’re used and what they can do for your website.

You’ve probably been told that all you need to do is get a big list of keywords (some times called search terms, or search phrases). This big list of keywords then goes in your copy. It also goes in what is called a META tag in your web code. And when you’ve got this done, you just sit back and watch the search engines build your business for you.

Well, it used to sort of be that way. But it’s nothing like that today.

You see, when popularity in the internet was growing early on, search engines did track big lists of keywords and use them in search results.

Ten years ago one of the most effective ways to get high rankings in the search engines was to add that big list of keywords to the META tag.

Remember, the internet did not begin with commerce, blogging or personal interest in mind. It began with scientist wanting to quickly share data from experiments. The first search engines were designed merely to make it easy for researchers to find data for papers and projects.

So, the people who wrote the parameters for internet coding (HTML, HTTP, etc) created META tags. These META tags housed metadata that was used to catalog and quickly search for research data.

META tags have attributes. One of those attributes is called “keywords.” The keywords attribute was established so that researchers could better cross-reference similar data. That way when a research chemist searched the then internet for “peptide reactions,” they would not only get specific experiments about peptide reactions, but also data that related in some way to it.

So back then the internet was nor more than a valuable research tool. Therefore, the accuracy of data and the ease of searching and sharing that data was of the only importance. And the keyword attribute was one of the most important ways to catalog that data.

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