Everyone has been left scratching their heads and asking... What do I do to avoid this crap and make Internet mine again? How do I build my business and promote it without having to deal with email? After all, what's point in spending money on email advertising campaigns when there is no guarantee that emails will even reach their destination?

Enter... RSS. RSS is perfect communication tool. It's applications far outreach those of email for marketing, publishing and personal communications. RSS is answer to our communication woes.

Using RSS to create blogs for communicating with customers, affiliates, partners and family is far and away more effective and reliable than email ever was. As a marketing tool, it really packs a punch that email never could. The reason being is that blogs are targets for search engine spiders. They are themselves, a web presence, whereas email never was and never will be.

Just like a web page, search engine spiders hit blog pages and rank them. The difference between static web page and RSS feed is that web pages seldom update their content, RSS feeds, by design, are created to be dynamic and provide regularly updated content, in theory, depending on blog owner of course. This prompts search engine spiders to revisit and rerank them more often.

For writers, publishers and and anyone else with something to say, RSS has been a godsend. It has provided answer to question of what to do now. Blogging has replaced email for those who have become frustrated with dealing with problems of email publishing and marketing. Publishers can now get their message out to their subscribers without headaches associated with sending email, or posting static pages to web. Even publishing an ezine to Internet as a web page required sending of email to make readers aware of newest issue.

As with anything, there is a right way and a wrong way to do things, and blog publishing is no exception. Now that RSS has become rage for marketing purposes, several people have taken it upon themselves, in name of almighty dollar, to pollute this well too. The newest rash of 'RSS tools' have created some issues of ethics and and credibility. With perhaps honest intention of being search engine optimization tools, or an automated system for fetching content, this batch of stuff has too much potential for misuse. The result of misuse of these types of programs can be devastating. Already some of these programs have been banned from places like Google and Blogharbour because of this potential.

Programs such as these in hands of inexperienced, will cause future problems for bloggers down road. More and more pages generated using these programs will be banned, and getting banned, right out of gate, for a newbie, would be a sad thing indeed.

The right way to use blogging to increase your search engine presence is to publish good content. Period. Provide useful information to those who are looking for it. Become someone's trusted information provider, and you have a customer for life. Publish keyword rich articles that give searcher what they are looking for... solutions for problems.

Publish your information regularly. Weekly is good, daily is better. Sending pings and things too often will get you blacklisted too.

Most people do not think of SEO as a game. Let me take 5 minutes of your time and explain how SEO is simply a game of Chess.

I remember as a teenager learning how to play Chess for first time. Man it was complicated. Each piece moved different ways. You couldn't take shortcuts and get game over with. You had to really think about your moves and watch your opponents moves as well. With each move they made, you had to analyze your next move and even best plans of attack had to be readjusted constantly. The game was always changing depending on who you played against. But once you understood game, once you understood all components of game, you were hooked.

The same goes for SEO.

The First Step to playing SEO Game is understanding game.

Read rules of game. Understand what is allowed, what is not allowed, and things you must avoid. Research how people will find you. Know what your keyword/keyword phrases are. Who will be coming into your website? Who will you be marketing to?

Google Rules and Guidelines can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Yahoo Guidelines can be found at http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/deletions/deletions-05.html

MSN Guidelines can be found at http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm

Setting Up Your Chessboard (or website)

Set up your website correctly from start. Make sure all pieces of your website are were they belong. For instance, place your Title tags and Meta tags into your headtags. Create clean style web pages from start. Move your javascripting and css off page and into their own file so that search engines can get to what is important right away.

Playing The Game

In Chess, rook and bishop do not move same way on your chessboard. Understand how each piece of game moves and works and use them to help you win game.

The same is true for your SEO. For example, many people do not use their head tags correctly. They try to stuff as many keywords as they can think of into Meta Keywords tag. This will not get you far in game. Try to be focused in your keywords. Use 3-5 keyword/keyword phrases at most and never use same word more then 3 times.

Make sure you are using all pieces of game. Title tags, Meta Tags, H1 Tags, Content, Links, Relevancy, etc. Some people think when playing chess that pawns are really of no use. You can lose them, you can keep them, no big deal. The same can be said about Meta Tags. However when playing against Yahoo or MSN, they will take advantage of your pawns. More so then when playing with Google. But why would you not use these pieces in a game? Why would you not take advantage of every single piece and make each one as important as others. Would you have a better chance of winning if you used each piece of game instead of only a few?