Scraps Of Mind

6 Tips to Make Your Blog Posts Attractive to Google

Have you ever noticed how some of your blog posts seem to attract more visitors from Google than others do?

Incidentally you can see this information in whatever statistics package you use. For Wordpress bloggers it’s in the Stats Dashboard and for others it is sure to be in the stats section of your platform’s dashboard. Or you can sign up to a free Google Analytics account which will give you more information about your blog’s visitors than you can imagine existed.

Anyway, back to the topic.

There are reasons why some of your posts attract more Google visitors than others. And one of those reasons is probably in your post Title.

Google searches operate with key words or phrases. These are the words that you type into the search box to locate all the web pages that include your search criteria. Unless the key words you type in are pretty obscure, Google will probably return thousands (or even millions) of links to pages where the key words you are searching for appear. There might be hundreds of screens with these links.

Now obviously no one who is searching on Google is going to wade through hundreds of screens to find what they want. Usually they will only go as far as the first handful of screens and select from the links that they find there.

So how do those web pages make it to the first few screens?

Well some of them pay Google for their position at the top of the list, but for most of the rest it’s because they do something called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) on their web pages to get Google to notice them more.

SEO is a huge topic and covers many things but here are a few simple things that you might like to keep in mind when you’re writing your blog posts that will improve their position on Google search rankings.

1 Choose your key words and key phrases

Try to make them not too generic. You’ll have better success if you choose a phrase that isn’t being used by hundreds of thousands of other web sites.

If you look at the stats on your Google visitors you will see which key phrases your visitors typed in to find your site. These would make a good starting point for choosing your key words and phrases.

2 Try to include your keywords in your post title

When Google is searching for keywords placing is very important. Keywords in the title carry far more ‘weight’ with the Google search engine than when they just appear in the content of your post.

3 Include your keywords in your heading

After your Title, the next most important place (from a ‘weight perspective) is in your Headings.

Your Headings should use the headings tags (h1,h2,h3,h4) to count or the search engine won’t realise they are headings. There is usually a formatting icon on your blog’s editing tool that let’s you choose whether your text is to be part of your regular content or a heading.

4 Include your keywords in your content

Sprinkling your key words throughout your content will also help your post rank well for your chosen key words.

Just remember your post is being written to be read by humans so don’t stuff it full of key words so that it’s not good to read.

5 Include your keywords in your tags

Before you publish your post you will have the option to add tags. Make sure that your key word or phrase is one of the tags.

6 Link to the post from other posts

If you have the opportunity to link to your ‘key word’ post in other posts that you write, do it. Especially if you can use your key words to form the anchor text (the text that you make the link on).

Now just start watching your stats to see how many new visitors Google brings to your blog.