Jamie Grove of the excellent writing blog How Not to Write has created something special for iPhone or iPod Touch owners who write: WriteChain. More than just a word-count tracker, WriteChain is built around the principle of the chain, encouraging you to write every day to avoid “breaking the chain”.

WriteChain is a simple app. On the home page, you enter how many words you write each day. If you want, you can add notes by editing the day’s session under the “Sessions” tab. WriteChain will keep track of each day’s session, and let you review the sessions and notes whenever you want.

But that’s not the real reason to own WriteChain. The “special sauce” of WriteChain is the idea of a chain. Here’s how it works: you enter in a daily writing goal, and every day you meet that goal, you add a “link” to the “chain”. Your goal is to keep the chain unbroken – to keep adding links day after day after day – and WriteChain will let you know if you let the chain break.

If you’re not a daily writer, that’s ok – you can select a longer period in the preferences. So, for example, you could select a maximum timeframe of 3 days. As long as you meet your writing goal in that three days, you’ll earn your link; go three days and an hour (or 14 weeks, or a year-and-a-half) without reaching your writing goal, and the chain is broken – you’ll have to start over again with zero links.

WriteChain is not a revolutionary app. What it is is a convenient and fun way to keep track of your writing. If you’re an iPhone or iPod Touch user, it’s certainly worth adding to your mobile writing toolkit. For more information, visit the WriteChain page on Jamie’s site, or download WriteChain directly from iTunes.

WriteChain: iTunes (99 cents)

Twitter is one of the most significant social media platforms to emerge in the last couple of years. If you’re not familiar with Twitter, have a look at this post where I explain the general concept, then head over to Twitter.com and sign up for a free account.

I’m always interested in finding new people to follow on Twitter, especially writers (because, let’s face it, if you’re gonna read something someone wrote, even in 140 characters or less, it’s always better if that person can write!) and I figure many of the readers of this site are, too, so here’s the deal: drop a link to your Twitter profile (In the form http://www.twitter.com/username) into the comments along with your name, and every few days I’ll shift them into this post to create a single list of Twitterers. Follow them and join the conversation!

Check back every couple of days and see who’s new and who you might want to follow!

Here’s the list to date (names link to website, when it’s given, @username links to Twitter profile):

1. Dustin M. Wax (@dwax)
2. Kimberlee Ferrell (@kimferrell)
3. Sonja Faust (@Sonja_Faust)
4. Johne Cook (@theskypirate)
5. Curt Wingerter (@Artistcw)
6. Douglas (@palisade14)
7. Alex Lobov (@alexlobov)
8. Thursday Bram (@thursdayb)
9. Copywriter Underground (@ChandlerWrites)
10. James Chartrand (@MenWithPens) 
11. Brandon J. Mendelson (@BJMendelson)
12. Elspeth Murray (@ElspethMurray)
13. Monica Valentinelli (@mlvalentine)
14. Rich Chastang (@richcat1989)
15. Tom Colvin (@tomcolvin)
16. Carolyn (@WordCountess)
17. Nathan E. Lilly (@nelilly)
18. Silvia Straka (@silviastraka)
19. Jetse de Vries (@Shineanthology)
20. James Mallinson (@jmallinson)
21. Roy Jacobsen (@rjacobse)
22. Jeff Wetherington (@thewordofjeff)
23. Zoe Westhof (@zoewesthof)
24. Danielle Marie Crume (@sumsette)
25. Michael Pokocky (@michaelpokocky)
26. Carly Tuma (@ThePiratess)
27. J.M. Strother (@jmstro)
28. Sina’i Enantia (@SinaiEnantia)
29. Jennifer Aderhold (@jjaderhold)
30. Who’s next?

A Twitter Tip for Writers

One of the cool things about Twitter is you can search the tweets of virtually everyone on Twitter (except a few holdouts whose stream is marked “private”). Go to search.twitter.com and search on any keyword to see what people are saying about it (try your name or the titles of your books to see what kind of buzz is out there).

I use Tweetdeck, a desktop Twitter client, which allows you (among other things) to set up a live search in a column that is automatically updated whenever a new tweet is posted by anyone on Twitter that contains the keyword for that search. The most useful search term I have is “for writers” (with the quotes), which is updated whenever someone posts a job “for writers”, a question “for writers”, or a link to a good post “for writers”.

Have another good search term “for writers”? Add it to the comments along with your Twitter ID!

Want More Writers on Twitter?

Twittterpacks.com is a site that collects sets of Twitterers you should follow and orders them by category. CHeck out the WRiting Twitterers here.

Image via Wikipedia

While researching an article about iPhones, I was contacted by Cheryl Kaye Tardif, best-selling author of numerous novels such as Whale Song. Tardif has embarked on a new project: writing a complete novel on her iPhone – the first major mainstream author to do so.

I kind of stumbled onto this by accident. One night while watching TV I was inspired by an idea for a new novel; I’m a bestselling suspense author with 3 published novels.

This new novel idea hit hard and fast and I didn’t want to lose one thought, so I reached for my iPhone 3G, which at the time I’d had for a week or so. Opening the Notes application for the first time, I started typing in my ideas. This led to opening a new file in Notes and actually writing the first paragraph or two of the novel.

Then I discovered I could email my Notes to myself. I did this and later that evening after the TV show I was watching was over, I rushed upstairs and opened the email on my PC. Copy and paste brought it into an MS Word doc, and ta-da! I’d officially started a new novel.

The novel, Finding Bliss, is still in the “fermenting” stage, says Tardif – she’s wrapping up another novel to send to the publisher, and editing another that’s due to come out soon. But she’s excited about doing this.

My first question, of course, was “why”?” I mean, I’m a big techie (of course) and I’ve written quite a bit on similar devices like my trusty old Palm IIIe, but the thought of tapping out 80,000 words or so on the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard fills me with dread!

Tardif gives several reasons for undertaking such a big project on such a small device. First, there’s the convenience. “This is huge for me,” she says, “since I am struck with ideas virtually anywhere, any time.”

Second, she finds the immediacy of the iPhone fits the topic of the novel quite well. “Finding Bliss is told in first person, from the perspective of Bliss Morgan, a damaged teenage girl who must fight to survive in a world of abuse, lies and loss. It will read almost as a diary, and writing my thoughts down when I get them is key.”

But most importantly, she says, writing a novel on an iPhone is great publicity. “To be honest, writing Finding Bliss in this way makes this novel unique, intriguing, and very pitchable to a publisher and sponsors.” Before you dismiss that as shallow, opportunistic, or overly commercial, remember that we live in an attention economy, and writers are not just expected but required to bring with their manuscripts a willingness to market their work and the savvy-ness to do it well. There is a special term for authors who aren’t willing to go the extra mile to capture the public’s attention: “unpublished”.

Tardif has found a great way to distinguish herself from the pack, and the public (and publishers) are paying attention. She’s been featured in several newspapers, and been contacted by retailers and websites looking to arrange exclusive releases of her finished book – and she’s only two chapters in!

Tardif offers this advice for authors looking to use their iPhones to write on:

Writing a novel on a small device like the iPhone 3G requires a fair amount of patience. There’s also a learning curve with the phone, so writers attempting this have to be willing to take their time. This probably won’t be a novel that’s written in 4 months.

I think that anyone attempting this should understand why they want to write this way. Are there advantages? Do the advantages outweigh the restrictions? Keep in mind, there is little room to edit, and certainly major editing would be done once converted into the Word doc.

More importantly, she sets a great example for writers looking for creative ways to promote themselves and their work. It hasn’t all been done before, but you’ve got to be willing to do whatever it takes to get yourself noticed. “Let’s face it,” she told me, “every author needs to get noticed if they want to succeed, especially fiction authors. And I plan to succeed! ”

Good advice!

I started writing the manuscript at the end of last year, but set it aside when the Spring semester of this year turned out to be a little more than I could manage. I finished a few chapters during Spring Break, and finished it up during my summer vacation. In the end, it came out at just shy of 20,000 words – not all that long for a book, but good for the kind of audience I’m trying to reach: young, academically-inclined but probably overloaded with required reading and other work, anxious to do well but not appear to be trying too hard, someone looking for some quick advice that’s direct and to-the-point.

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to be visiting some of the tasks that I performed in the writing of the book. Since the book is self-published (I figured it was too short to make it as a commercial offering, although if there’s enough of a demand I might approach publishers with a greatly expanded 2nd edition – the nice thing about writing for college students is that the market refreshes itself entirely every few years) bringing it to market involved writing it, editing it, laying it out, designing the cover, compiling the book in both an e-book format and a format that could be printed, selecting a POD publisher, and marketing it (which is where I’m at now).

At each step of the way, I’ve used a variety of different tools, including:

• Adobe Buzzword for the first draft.
• Word 2007 for editing and rough layout.
• Adobe InDesign CS2 for print/e-book layout.
• iStockPhoto for the cover image.
• e-Junkie for e-book distribution.
• Amazon’s CreateSpace for paperback production and physical distribution.

I want to write about why I chose each of these tools, how I used them, and the problems they presented (when relevant). This won’t be a formal series; instead, I’ll be writing loosely related posts on topics that arose in the writing, publishing, and marketing of the book, touching on various topics as they occur to me.

If you have any questions you’d like to see addressed, please feel free to email me or leave comments on this post – I’m sure I can’t anticipate every possible question that someone might have about this process.

I will, of course, be writing about the kinds of things I usually write about, as well. I have a bunch of tools I want to write up, and am wrapping up a series on capturing and organizing ideas that should go up in the next week or two. I’m also working on setting up a guest host for the site for a week or two while I move, probably at the beginning of next month.

(Speaking of which, a couple of people have written me about contributing a post or two; I’ve been so swamped getting this book finished, really pushing my freelance writing, starting a new semester as an instructor, preparing for the move, and doing everything else I’ve somehow taken on that I haven’t been really good about replying. If you haven’t heard back from me, drop me a line again and let’s see what we can arrange.) 

I’m also trying to think of some way of participating in National Novel Writing Month, which is in November. I’m not a novelist, or a fiction writer in any sense (someday…) but I’m a big fan of NaNoWriMo, and I’d like to come up with a way to take part in the excitement without actually writing a novel, since I don’t write novels (and have the whole “writing 50,000 words in a month” thing down pretty much pat already). If you have any ideas, shoot me a line. 

• They’re “push” technology: Instead of waiting for a reader to visit your blog, or check their RSS reader, you “push” newsletters directly into readers’ email inboxes. Since most people check their email daily (at least!) there’s a good chance they’ll read your newsletter the day you send it (or shortly thereafter).
• You build a list: You have a record of the email addresses — and often the name and other information, such as location — of your newsletter readers. This is valuable information for anyone with some marketing savvy; most importantly, it means you can always reach the readers most important to you.
• You have pretty exact numbers: It can be hard to analyze website logs to determine how many people are visiting your site and what they’re doing there. Are unique visitors more important, or daily hits, or time spent on site? How do you put it all together? With email newsletters, you have numbers that are more like a magazines subscription count: while you can’t be positive the people who get the newsletter are reading it, you know exactly how many are getting it.

Use Feedburner to Create Your Newsletter

The easiest way to set up a newsletter is to use Feedburner’s email service. Feedburner is an RSS feed service, but they can take the content of your RSS feed (which is generated automatically by most blogging sites’ software) and send it via email. They handle the signups and confirmations, providing a sign-up form you can embed on your site, and will auto-generate a newsletter whenever there’s new content in your feed.

You can use Feedburner to simply recreate your blog in email form — every time you post, your list will get a copy of the post via email. Since only a small percentage of websurfers really “get” RSS, this provides a way to turn first-time visitors into regular readers. You can customize the header of your newsletter with a logo, and include ads in your newsletters if you want.

With very little work, you could also create a specialized newsletter “channel”, offering premium or bonus content in addition to your blog — or instead of blogging at all. In WordPress, you can easily set up a category of posts that don’t get published to the front page, and generate category-specific feeds (they’re at “http://yoursitename.com/category/categoryname/feed” for each category). Create a “newsletter” category, and feed its URL to Feedburner. If you’d like to send newsletters out on a specific day, simply schedule all your posts to be published on that day using the WordPress “Schedule” function. On the allotted day, Feedburner will collect all the posts from your RSS feed, apply your custom formatting and header, and generate a table of contents that will appear at the top of your newsletter.

Enter e-Junkie. For $5 US a month, e-Junkie provides you with an online shopping cart, storage for digital downloads, order processing, inventory management, email autoresponders, and a lot more.

Let’s say you’ve written an e-book. You upload the file to e-Junkie, write a sales page on your own site, and insert e-Junkie’s code to place a “Buy it now” button on your page. When visitors click through to buy your e-book, they’re directed to your e-Junkie shopping cart, where they can pay via PayPal or Google Checkout (or a couple of other services) and instantly get a download link.

e-Junkie will also handle physical products — it works the same way, except that when an order is placed, you get an email with the details so you can fulfill the order yourself. You can offer several variants — say, a paperback and hardcover of the same book. e-Junkie will even calculate the shipping costs and sales tax (where applicable).

What makes e-Junkie especially compelling is the ability to set up affiliate programs so that other people can promote and sell your product. You choose how much you’d like to pay per sale — say, 20% of the sale price — and e-Junkie will provide your affiliates with a tracking code they can use to send sales your way. e-Junkie doesn’t administer the affiliate program; at the end of the month, you’ll get a tally of affiliate sales and you have to pay off your affiliates (via PayPal, usually).

Of course, you can always join the affiliate program of any of your fellow e-Junkie sellers. Signing up is easy — find a product you like in their affiliates directory (under the “Affiliates” tab), and click the link at the bottom to join their affiliate program. You’ll get a choice of either a text link to customize or a “Buy Now” button you can put on your site — the idea is, you write your review, sales page, blog post, or other copy, and the author pays you for your help.

Although e-Junkie allows sellers to market a wide range of products, it seems designed with e-books and software — downloadable products — in mind. Tough luck for everyone else, but good news for writers!

Go check out e-Junkie. As far as I’ve seen, they’re the only ones offering this kind of service, and they do it very well.

And here’s the kicker — your commission ranges from 4% to 8.5%, which means that, depending on how many sales you achieve and what your agreement with your publisher is, you may end up making more from Amazon sales than you do from your royalties! Look:

Royalties: If you sell a book at $19.99, and get 5% of the wholesale price (usually 60% of the cover price), you’ll make .05 x .60 x $19.99 = $0.60. If you sell 100 copies, you’ll make $60 in royalties.
Amazon Associates: The same book might be marked down at Amazon to $15.99. If you sell one copy, you get 4% of 15.99, which is $0.64. If you sell 100 books, your commission is 6.5%, which nets you $1.04 per copy, or $104 for 100 books. Of course, you still get royalties on those books, too.

To create a link, you can log into your Amazon Associates account and select from dozens of “Widgets”, including ones that will scan your page and automatically create banners targeted towards the keywords on your page (it’s called Omakase). I don’t generally like their widgets, though they’re ok as ads to run in your site’s sidebar. Usually, I create links manually, by adding my associate ID to the end of the URL for a product page. Here’s how:

1. Search for a product. For illustration, we’ll use my book Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War.
2. Go to the product’s main page and copy it’s URL. For my book, it’s: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203705368&sr=8–1
3. See that string of numbers after the title and before where it says “ref=pd_bbs_sr_1…”? We only need the link up to there, so cut everything after the slash.
4. The new URL looks like this: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/
5. That’s enough to find the book with, but it doesn’t have my associate ID attached yet. My associate ID code is “dwax-20″, and I’ll just add it to the end — Amazon is really good at picking out your associates ID.
6. The new URL looks like this: http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-at-Dawn-Cold-War/dp/0745325866/dwax-20. Clicking that link will take you to the exact same page, but I’ll get credit if you buy the book. In fact, I’ll get credit if you decide not to buy it and buy something else, instead, as long as you entered the site using my link.

Barnes and Noble also has an affiliate program, if you prefer working with them for whatever reason. I find Amazon’s to be far more useful (in terms of providing value to website visitors) but in the end, it’s links to books — and whichever company you feel offers the best combination of value and compensation should get your traffic. Borders recently “divorced” Amazon, launching it’s own online bookstore after several years of fulfilling orders through Amazon. Their affiliate program, then, is only just getting off the ground, but if you prefer Borders, that’s the way to go.

Use your affiliate link wherever you promote your book — on your website, in your email signature, on forums, anywhere you can paste a link. Obviously the vast majority of your sales will not come from you telling people where to find your book, but if you’re an active promoter, a significant number of sales will come from your link, which will be a nice bonus above your regular royalties — and you won’t have to wait a year to collect, either.

Signing up is a little tricky. You have to have an Amazon account, which is easy enough — who doesn’t have one, these days? Once you’ve logged in on the Amazon Connect page, it will send you an email to verify your email address. You click the link, return to Amazon Connect, and continue. You’ll have to “claim” your books — you can claim anything you’re the author of or have a chapter in, from what I understand. This is handled using a nifty little search bar — search your name, and click “add” to claim which ever titles in the results are yours.

Here’s the tricky part — you need a third party — an agent, a publisher, or an editor — to verify your “ownership” of the title. Once you’ve added a title, there’s a little “Select verifier” button; clicking it brings up a form to add your verifier’s contact information — name, company, email, and phone. I chose my editor. They’ll contact your verifier (hint: your verifier might not know about Amazon Connect, so best to tip them off to expect to hear from Amazon) and once you’ve been vouched for, you’re ready to go.

Now, here’s something nice: you can add your blog’s RSS feed! Which means your latest posts on your blog will appear on Amazon — which is nice for me, since I talk about my work a lot in my personal blog (dwax.org, if you care). Of course, if you post stuff on your site that would be out of place on Amazon — maybe you write erotica and children’s books, and keep an erotica blog — it might be a bad idea to use your blog’s feed… You can still add posts directly to your page from inside Amazon, whether or not you also import your blog posts.

It takes a while to verify your account, but you can log into your profile page and start adding pictures, a bio, and even posts immediately (although posts won’t show up until your account is verified). If you’re self-published, check with your printer or publishing service to see if there’s someone there who can verify your authorship — I’m not sure exactly how that works (if anyone’s had any luck with that, let me know in the comments).

Amazon Connect seems like a great deal for published writers — although naturally it only allows you to reach out to Amazon shoppers. I don’t know if other online book stores will follow suit, but if they do, hopefully they’ll all allow you to import posts from your blog’s RSS feed. I could see setting up a new blog for each book and feeding posts to several online bookstores from that single point. I can’t see logging into several different bookstores on anything like a regular basis and creating new posts for all of them — sounds like a logistical nightmare. That said, it might be what’s needed, since few publishers offer much in the way of marketing these days except to their top sellers. Since Amazon is clearly the #1 online bookseller, a little effort there might go a long ways towards making up for the lack of marketing from your publisher.

Note: I know that many authors are upset with Amazon over their poor treatment of self-publishers. Some are boycotting Amazon and focusing on B&N or Borders to promote their work. I’m sympathetic to that cause, but if you have a traditionally-published book, you can’t afford to ignore Amazon sales. If Borders or B&N offer a similar service, I’d recommend using theirs, too, but Amazon is, as far as I can tell, the only one to offer something like this.

This week, we’ll be looking at several plugins a writer’s site should have. Some of these are useful, even essential, for any site, such as the ones that prevent spammers from filling your comments with ads for porn and poker sites. Others are highly specialized to meet the specific needs of writers, such as one that allows you to share your writing goals and your progress towards them with your readers.

To give you a taste of what plugins can do, I thought I’d start by introducing “Javascript Pull-Quotes”, a plugin that allows you to place selected text from your post into nicely formatted pullquotes. Adding a pull-quote is easy with Javascript Pull-Quotes; all you have to do is place <span class=“pullquote”>around the content you want in the pullquote</span>. If you use the visual editor in WP, it’s even easier — the plugin inserts a pull-quote button into the writing toolbar — highlight the text you want as a pull-quote and hit the button.

Javascript Pull-Quotes offers several ways to customize the look and placement of your pull-quotes — you can try one of five built-in styles, or if you’re comfortable with CSS, you can add new definitions to your site’s stylesheet. You can place pull-quotes on the left or right-hand side of your text column, and you can have each subsequent pull-quote alternate sides.

Nobody outside of Google knows exactly how Google ranks it’s search results. It’s a closely-guarded trade secret. But the general outlines are pretty well-known, if not the exact algorithm. Google has thousands of computers running programs called “‘bots” (short for “robots”) or “spiders” that pick a known page, index it, follow all the links on the page, index the pages linked to, follow links on those pages, index the new set of pages, and so on.

As Google’s ‘bots “crawl” the web, they assign each page a PageRank, Google’s estimation of the importance of the page. This figure is arrived at by looking at the keywords on the page, the number of times and the placement of the keywords (which help determine what the main topics covered by the page are), the relation between those keywords, and the relation of the page to other pages on the web. The last part is calculated according to the number of other sites that link to a page, and their PageRank.

Let’s say you write books about fishing. On a page about your book, “Trout Fishing in Kansas”, the words “trout”, “fishing”, and “Kansas” are going to be important keywords — you’ll have used them a lot, they’ll be in the page’s title, headings, and sub-headings, and there may be links to other pages on the web about trout, fishing, and Kansas.

If a lot of other sites that Google has already determined are about trout, fishing, or Kansas link to your site, Google assumes that you must know a thing or two about those topics — if the Kansas Trout Fishing Commission thinks your page is worth linking to, Google figures, you must be an expert. And therefore people searching for information on Kansas trout fishing would probably want to find your site — as opposed, say, to a Kansas City, MO, bookstore that sells Trout Fishing in America.

Knowing that, it’s pretty clear what you have to do to assure a strong showing for your site in Google search results:

• Write good content: As they say on the web, content is king. Writing strong content about your chosen topics will give Google lots of keywords to work with, and encourage other sites to link to you.
• Write good headings and sub-heads: Google assumes that anything marked as a header (with header tags like “h2” and “h3”) are more likely to be keywords, and rates them more highly. Choose descriptive titles for your posts rather than obscure ones’.
  • Better - The Difficulties of Trout Fishing on the Missouri River
  • Worse -Them Buggers Ain’t Biting!
• Write descriptive link text: Google gives more weight to keywords it finds in links, so when linking to other sites, describe the other site’s content well. Don’t write “click here”, write “visit Fishing World to buy Acme Fishing Line”.
• Get linked to: The more relevant links Google finds to your site, the higher your site will appear in search results, so make sure your content is worth linking to and make sure you promote it so other web writers in your niche see it.
• Put keywords in your page’s title: Every page has a title that appears at the very top of your web browser when you visit it. Most blog software will put the site’s title and the post’s title into the page title, like this “Getting Noticed by Google — Writer’s Technology Companion”. Keep that in mind when naming your site — pick something like “Mary Ann Whiting, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer” rather than “Mary’s Site”.
• Update regularly: The more often Google indexes your site, the better. Google looks at the update frequency to determine hw often it needs to revisit the site. If you update daily, it’s going to come back more often than if you update every couple of months when you feel like it. Try to update at least once every week or so, to keep Google coming back often.

There are a lot of companies out there that offer “SEO”, “Search Engine Optimization”, services. While some of these do a pretty good job (mostly by doing the kind of stuff I talk about above), they’re really intended for corporate sites (and charge accordingly!). Beware of sites that offer cheap SEO services to end users — most of them a) don’t work, and b) use questionable tactics that not only won’t work but could get your site delisted from Google entirely.

Here are some tactics that don’t work and could actually hurt your search ranking with Google:

• Getting links from unrelated sites: It pays to be selective about who you try to get to link to you. If the site isn’t well-established for your particular keywords, it’s not going to give you much of a boost. Likewise if a page is just a bunch of links.
• Link farms: Some services offer to get your site tons of links, for a fee. They build “link farms”, interlinked sets of pages with only links to sites that have bought links. Google looks unkindly on this and you’ll get dinged for it.
• Link-swapping or buying links: There are a number of link-swapping services (“you link to me, I’ll link to you”); Google tends to ignore links on sites in link-swapping groups (including non-swapped links) and may actively punish sites hosting swapped links (which means you). Same for ad networks that allow you to buy text links on other sites — which is especially galling since Google’s AdWords program is essentially a service that allows you to buy text links on other sites! But Google is the boss, here, so save your money and focus on content.
• Loading your page with invisible keywords: In olden days, people would put in hundreds of keywords at the bottom of their page, setting the text color to be the same as the background color. Search engines don’t see text color, the thinking went, so they’d see (and index) the text but nobody else would. All the search engines are wise to this, and will ding you for it.

There are tricks that will work — for a little while, until Google and the other search engines get wise to it and change how they rank pages. It’s far better to focus on writing good stuff for your human visitors and let your site grow organically than to waste time, effort, and money trying to write for the computers at Google. It might take a little longer, but if you have a strong site with well-defined keywords and people find your site useful enough to link to, you’ll gradually move up the search rankings to the top.