Q: You have been creating and contributing to Web sites since 1996. How did you get started? And did that have much of an impact on your writing career?
A: I created my first Web site as a Compuserve user. I called it "The Worlds of Michael Martinez", and it was just a loosely organized collection of pages about me. I rambled on. People liked it, though. I received quite a bit of email about that site. Especially about the page where I discussed the movies I liked.
Eventually, I created several more Web sites, and placed them on different servers because space was limited and expensive back then. In late 1996 and early 1997, the average free Web account had about 1-10 megabytes of disk space to use. By February 1997, I realized I had enough Web sites (four relatively large ones) to justify setting up my own domain. I agonized over the domain name for three weeks. Finally, I settled on Xenite.Org and it went live on March 14. Within a few months, a team of volunteers began helping me with Xena Online Resources. Dixie, one of those first volunteers, is still with me and she is now my full partner in the Web property.
Writing content for Web sites, and promotional copy for them, has helped tremendously. It has also provided me with a solid foundation for marketing my books and promoting my essays at Suite101 and MERP.COM.
Q: You spent a lot of time in certain Web marketing communities for a few years. How did that experience help you?
A: When I first joined those communities, I was frustrated and confused. No matter how hard I tried to build traffic for my sites, it seemed like other sites with less content kept getting more. So, eventually, I found references to search engine optimization on a few Web sites. I tried some of the submittal tools and they worked okay for a while, but the traffic began to die off. I didn't understand how other sites with less relevant content kept coming up for searches I made on Altavista, Yahoo!, and other popular engines.
When I joined my first search engine forum, I learned a great deal about the marketing strategies and techniques that many professional promoters and Web operators employed. I also learned about search engine spam. As people helped me learn to improve my rankings, I gave back to those communities as much as I could. As my rankings on search engines improved, my traffic improved. But I also disovered that a lot of people were sending traffic to my sites from their sites. The more well-known Xenite.Org became, the more popular it became. Learning the fundamentals of Web design and optimization helped tremendously.
Q: Do you recommend that other Webmasters join these communities?
A: I think it's important for Webmasters who truly want the traffic, who have the ambition to be competitive, to learn how the work is done. I'm talking about learning the fundamentals. The special tips and tricks, the neat gimmicks, those really are not important. They are icing on the cake, as it were.
There are some very good tutorials out there which people should read. But the biggest problem with search engine tutorials is that they quickly become outdated. I've written a few myself. The search engines and directories are constantly updating their technologies, and many older search services are either no longer active or they have been relegated to advertising.
The real problem for people is that there is no way to tell which advice is good and which advice is bad. A lot of people run into problems where they try out something and it either doesn't work or it backfires. Unfortunately, there are no reliable or credible professional Web promotion organizations. Furthermore, many of the SEO communities have compromised their integrity by closely alligning themselves with search services. One community operator even accepted paid advertisements from search services while claiming he was independent and neutral.
It's a world where you have to take everything you see with a grain of salt. And anything which is hysterical, extremely negative, or super-positive and enthusiastic, is probably as far removed from reality as can be. It's still a field where most people are learning by doing, and at the same time they are being preyed upon by unscrupulous or well-intentioned-but-poorly-qualified hucksters who claim to have the answers and tools that Webmasters need.
Q: Do you do any professional consulting?
A: I do now offer SEO Consulting services.
Q: Xenite.Org comes up first or close to first in hundreds of popular searches. Can anyone duplicate that success?
A: Anyone should be able to do much the same thing, but as with all markets, the best time to get in was at the beginning of the growth period. Now, the megasites like Xenite.Org tend to dominate listings because so many other sites link to us, and because we have lots of content. Xenite.Org is actually not as large as it used to be, but we still do very well.
