Important Changes to Infopackets.com: starting Next Week

I'm stoked.

For the last 3 months, I've been nibbling away at a special web script (project) that reformats all the previous Infopackets newsletters into a simple, clean layout.

Why all the excitement?

There are a lot of great things to come now that this daunting task is nearing completion. With article layout standardized, I can now move forward with:

a) splitting articles into separate pages: it is important to split the articles so that potential web visitors can locate our web site through search engines (such as Google). As it stands now, 95% of all traffic to our web site is from our newsletter readers. There's nothing wrong with that -- however -- in terms of new traffic, infopackets.com hasn't experienced much growth in the past year because our web pages are not optimized for search engines. But, simply splitting the articles into separate pages isn't enough to generate more web traffic (discussed next).

b) generating keyword tags for articles: once articles have been split into separate pages, I'll use another program I wrote to generate HTML keyword and title tags. The tags will be injected invisibly into the articles (in HTML code); search engine robots will use this information to 'focus' more on these words throughout articles. Once the web page is optimized with the proper keywords and title tags, there is a much greater chance that it will rank higher in a search query and therefore receive more clicks. The keyword and title tags will also have a *massive* improvement on our own search engine, as relevant information will appear in the clickable links leading to the articles.

c) beginning RSS implementation: having the articles as separate web pages and in a standardized format means that implementing RSS news feeds will be a snap. As I've mentioned a number of times in the past, sending the newsletter through email is becoming extremely difficult to do -- especially with all the email spam filters that block legitimate content. RSS will be offered in addition to our email newsletter as a way to get around spam filters, and to ensure that Readers receive updates from our web site in a timely manner. Another bonus to using RSS is the fact that most news readers can keep track of which articles you have / not read, so it's easy to catch up with relevant and new information.

d) transforming our website into an interactive user forum: once the articles have been split into separate pages, users will be able to respond publicly to each article. In the very near future, Readers will also be able to post their own questions in the forum. The keyword meta tag processor program (discussed previously) will be used to optimize pages on the fly so that search engines can find what our users are writing about, in addition to editorials.

e) more news updates from our web site: with the implementation of RSS and advent of a public forum, I will be sending out the newsletter / RSS feeds more frequently (M-F instead of T-W-TH). Readers that use email to view our newsletter will be able to adjust newsletter delivery frequency. This option will be available soon.

With that said, you can expect to see these changes to our web site starting as early as next week.