My New Education

One of my grandmother's favorite sayings was:  "You learn something new every day."  Well, I think she was right, because this old dog has learned some new tricks in the past few days.

Up until recently, my internet experience was basically checking e-mail about once a month.  I started this blog and joined Facebook about a year ago, and started my website a few months ago.  At that point, I had sort of learned what HTML is (it's a code way of writing on the internet which uses symbols for punctuation, paragraphs, fonts, etc.)  I can't read it, but, oh well. In fact, in High School, when computers were young, and the WWW wasn't invented yet, I thought that computers were going to take over the world, and avoided them like the plague.  Now, I'm sure they're taking over the world and are almost there, but that's another story.

I joined Suite101 as a writer a couple of weeks ago, and as of this morning have made 54 cents, but I have gained more than money.  I really think I've learned something new everyday!  Here is my new Internet Writing notebook:

• Search Engine:  That thing you type into to find 2 million articles on how to brush your teeth.  Examples include Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
• SEO:  Search Engine Optimization - writing so that search engines will be able to find your article, using things such as - 
• Keywords:  Word phrases that people would be likely to search for.  You can apparently put these into the title, headings, first paragraph, and picture captions.  Some people put them all over, and use the same one over and over.  This is supposed to make you more visible to search engines.
• Scraped:  Somebody stole your article and put it on another website, where you won't get any royalties.
• Adwords:  Ads that a company places around your article which may someday make you some money if somebody actually reads them.
• Revenue Share:  Money you will hopefully get from people clicking on the ads (hence the 54 cents).
• Content Farm:  A company which looks for the most-searched subjects and then gets people to write articles about them in order to get money.   - Company business, here - In the past week, Suite101 has been called a content farm.  I know I'm new, but I don't really see it.  I have not been told what to  write about, and I don't believe anyone else on Suite has, either.  It is a very diverse magazine, and people write about things they are interested in or passionate about.  I think people use different levels of SEO to try to get their articles seen, some maybe trying to find out which articles will show better, but this is an individual decision.  Suite is actually very accommodating, and seem happy to let you write about anything you'd like.  They do edit the articles to make sure they are in the proper format and don't have mistakes and things, but that's all.
• Pageviews:  Something you get obsessed about, because you want people to read your article.
• Algorithm:  The way a search engine sets up their search - what they look for in articles, which sites they look at articles from, and a million other variables that I have absolutely understanding of.  This seems to make a difference in which page of the search your article will appear on, the ones being deemed best or most important supposedly showing first.

That's all I can get out of my wee little head this morning, but I can tell you this has been an amazing couple of weeks, and my brain is quite tangled.  If I have made any mistakes or left things out, please tell me, and I will include them in another post!  I may need help here to get a good grade!  Now, back to obsessing over my pageviews.

Oh - and if you want to share this post, please copy the URL and direct people here, so that I can get revenue.  Don't scrape it!  This has been a public service message.  Thank you.