StoreHows.com

I’ve been working on my Master List of articles and am nearly done! Talk about a long process. There have been some interesting details I seemed to have missed before and looking at each of my articles individually has been surprising. There are articles in the list that I had “forgotten” since it’s been so long since I had written them. There are also articles that seem to be set on eHow’s specific category pages that I wasn’t aware of.

Once I have my Master List done, I will start doing category pages. Using the list will make that process a whole lot faster – I can “see” that already! When I tested my list, the articles load lightning fast and the back space takes me back to the list quick. It sure will make browsing articles easy and fast for everyone!

There will also be an article about how to set up all the basics so anyone interested will be able to do the same for their articles.

For the time being, here is a basic tip – check each of your articles for keywords, categories, working links, spelling/grammar, and completeness of information. Start with the oldest and farthest from your interaction with it – then read it as though you are editing it for a friend.

If an article is out of date, change it around a bit and give people a reason to read it again anyway! Views help even if they aren’t counted as ratings! Re-editing and additional views, along with a new comment or even a reply by the author, helps get the article noticed again by search engines.

If there are no pics, try to find at least one that pertains to the article – not one that just gives you credit for having a pic. When the concept for this blog and, eventually, a full website came to me, I thought of it as a warehouse to store articles in. Then the concept shifted a bit and became a newspaper of sorts. I decided to let the ads we set up be our pics. In the future, I might set up a pic page – shrugs… Basically StoreHows.com will stay plain and allow the variety of the articles give it pizazz.

Just a heads up ~ even if eHow allowed the length when you published the article, their standards changed in November 2008. Now they insist on a minimum length and will not let you re-publish it once you have edited it unless you have at least the minimum amount of words. Usually I am a bit – shall we say… long winded? – but a couple of my original articles were too short because I felt brevity would show how easy a specific recipe was to make or some solution would be easy to accomplish. Shrugs shoulders…. Feels odd to someone who sometimes writes 10 full page letters to family and friends to be told they didn’t say enough…… hehehehe!