You may already have taken on the services of someone or offered your own services on any one of the number of sites like elance.com or freelancer.com.

I found out that you can offer your services directly with a little market research and a professional approach. One of my favorite tech blogs is TechCrunch. They ran a recent blog article about a product that dynamically places ads and other forms of content in video.

The CEO of actio.tv, a Russian competitor to this product, commented on the blog in response. I was intrigued by the positioning of his company’s product and visited the website. I noticed immediately that the English text on the website did a good job of describing the product and explaining how it worked, yet needed a lot of help in the areas of grammar and syntax.

To gain credibility and build the brand within the U.S., companies outside the U.S. must deliver a polished and professional presentation on their websites. I am always impressed by the capacity to speak and write English by those for whom English is not their first language (in America, we lag far behind in our education in foreign languages).

I sent off a quick email to the CEO offering my services to review and revise the website’s text and marketing thrust. We reached an agreement and I went to work. After I sent them the file and received an OK on it, I followed up with a request for payment to my PayPal account sent along with a warm thank you and a suggestion that others in his business network may need similar services. Outsourcing in reverse.

So, you don’t need to be an Amazon to make money marketing your products and services globally over the Internet. Research, networking, good communication skills, and a solid Web presence are key. Apply the right tool for the job, constantly upgrade and keep current your skills, and you will be in position to fill a need.

A final note: Breakaway Media is in the business of publishing eBooks that have been previously published by major publishing houses but have since gone out of print. Our major publishing channel? Amazon Kindle. So while you don’t need to be an Amazon, it helps to do business with Amazon. It’s all about the channel.

I thought it would be interesting to go to the root of the meaning.

From the freedictionary.com: Meta — A prefix meaning one level of description higher. From answers.com: Tag — A sequence of characters in a markup language used to provide information, such as formatting specifications, about a document.

So, meta in terms of markup language, means html code that is “one level higher”. And yes, with meta tags in WordPress, you will find them “near the top” and in fact, in the header.php of your WordPress site. Go to the theme editor from your WordPress theme dashboard and select header.php to begin work on your meta tags.

Codex.wordpress.org describes meta tags: “The word meta means information about. Meta Tags were created early on to provide concise information about a website. Meta tags list information about the web page, such as the author, keywords, description, type of document, copyright, and other core information.

In the interest of good search engine optimization practices, we need to pay some special attention to meta tags, but how much and how?

Meta tags no longer hold the level of importance with search engines that they used to hold, and quality content is more so than ever the biggest contributor to your search engine rankings. Do you want to rise higher in the search rankings? Improve the quality and relevance of your content.

Keywords still matter in your meta tags, though. Despite the fact that Google and other search engines discount sites engaged in “keyword stuffing”, and no longer look to keyword meta tags with the same level of regard when indexing your site, there is at least some value as long as your keywords match your content. At this time, your title and description tags will hold more weight than your keyword meta tags with the search engines, particularly Google, so careful research and selection of your keywords for those tags will make a larger difference.

The site at codex.wordpress.org gives a succinct description on where to place your WordPress site meta tags:

“To add meta tags to your site, simply add them to the header.php template file in your WordPress Theme, specifically in the head section near the link for the style sheet. At the top you will see the DOCTYPE tag and below that you will see a couple more tags and then the title tag…

Below this line you can add your meta tags. You can add meta tag information such as the content, language, author, contact, and copyright, since these are basically the same on every page of your site.”

Keep in mind that the dynamic types of information–and we are talking about description and keywords–is unique to every web page on your site. If you put them in the header.php, the information will not change throughout your site. This will compromise your site’s optimization for the search engines.

To optimize your site for the search engines, you need to dynamically add keywords and descriptions on every post. You can choose from ways to do this: you can add them as generic references or you can use plugins. In this way, your site will have added a description, keywords, and other meta tags that are unique to each generated post or page.

You can find additional information about meta tags, meta tag plug-ins and other resources at the codex.wordpress.org site . These plug-ins allow you to customize your meta tags and choose them for each post.

So, yes, Virginia, not only are there meta tags for WordPress, they are still a part of an effective search engine optimization strategy.

Getting it Going
Getting your microsite or landing page set up with WordPress is a several-step process. It may seem somewhat complicated at first, but with some dedication to learning the basics and a dose of persistence, virtually anyone can do it.

We assume that you have first done your search engine marketing homework and judiciously selected your domain name(s) based on targeted, relevant keywords. Go to a domain registrar like GoDaddy.com and register your domain. I have several domains registered with GoDaddy–the fees are reasonable and their services are good quality. A dot-com domain will set you back all of several dollars and you can buy multiple domains at a discount. You can get dot-biz or dot-info domains for even less.

You don’t have to register your domain with your host server company, in fact, I recommend you don’t–I think it’s better to keep the two separate and you’ll probably save money in the deal. All you need to do is use the domain name system settings of your host server company wherever your domain is registered. Once you’ve reset the DNS, propagation of the domain at your host server will take anywhere from an hour to a day or so, and you’ll be ready to move forward and install WordPress.

You’ll need a host server account with a company like Media Temple, BlueHost or HostGator. Full disclosure here (if you haven’t heard, there are new FTC rules governing endorsements and testimonials) — I use Media Temple and you may have noticed the mt-media temple banner ad on this site. I get a referral credit sent to my account when people sign up for their service through the link. I’ve used Media Temple since 2005 and their (gs) Grid Service is superb.

(gs) is a cluster-based service powered by hundreds of servers working in tandem to ensure power, burstability and reliability. I’ve also used BlueHost at the University of Arizona and their service also performed admirably. Hosting service fees will vary from about $75 to $250 a year or more, depending on how robust a service you need for your business, whether you pay upfront annually, and other factors.

In WordPress for Microsites and Landing Pages – part 2, we’ll talk about selection and installation of your WordPress themes and plug-ins and customizing your microsites and landing pages.

This short guide presents a concise overview of SEO for PR, boiling it down to five steps:

• Research Keywords
• Content Optimization
• Digital Asset Optimization
• Link Building
• Measuring Success

TopRank opens the piece with a quote from David Meerman Scott (The New Rules of Marketing & PR) that alludes to the new paradigm for journalists, bloggers and consumers who are using search engines to look for subject matter experts, trends and news, and information of all kinds.

Scott said he’s received over 25,000 email pitches to write stories on products, innovations, and tech solutions. Not one has resulted in a story written by him. He uses search engines to get ideas and information for his stories.

In his book, Scott talks about “The New Rules of News Releases”. Note that he uses the phrase “news releases”, not “press releases”. In a disintermediated Web world, communicators are reaching buyers directly with news releases distributed through the Web. Journalists and bloggers are finding these news releases with keyword (and keyword phrase) searches and using them to develop their stories and blog postings.

Many PR professionals who continue to invest themselves heavily in distributing press releases to the news media resist the idea of reaching huge audiences of consumers who are reading news releases directly on the Web and exercising that power on a daily basis.

It’s heartening to know that now it’s possible to get news of your product or service to your target audiences without having to hire a top-shelf PR agency to get your story placed in The New York Times. Of course, it’s a huge boost when NYT even mentions you in an article, but for Internet marketers, investing thousands and thousands of dollars in achieving that goal often makes little sense, especially when those same journalists are trolling the Web, looking for you.

In a future article, I’ll talk about how to write news releases for the Web and some ways that you can distribute them so they pop up in the search rankings.

So what do we mean when we use the term “search engine marketing”?  To get the answer to this and other terms, I went to a newly revised book by David Meerman Scott, The New Rules of Marketing and PR.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who is considering marketing their products or services in this new environment.

Here is what Scott has to say about SEM, search engine optimization, and search engine advertising:

“Search engine marketing means using search engines to reach your buyers directly.  (note:  this is the all-inclusive term that includes the two below).

“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of ensuring that the words and phrases on your site, blog, and other online content are found by the search engines and that once found, your site is given the highest ranking possible in the natural search results.

“Search engine advertising is when a marketer pays to have advertising appear in search engines when a user types in a particular phrase that the marketer has “purchased”.”

Scott makes some excellent distinctions here that really help us to understand what this is about.  I’ve been researching Internet marketing intensively this year, and while I learned a great deal during that time, The New Rules of Marketing and PR crystallized my understanding of much of that information for me and gave me practical ways of doing my own search engine marketing. 

(Note on blog post graphic: Yes, that is a mouse on the back of a cat on the back of a dog. Only in Bisbee….)