Scraps Of Mind

Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

Posted by karooch on

July 13, 2009

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.

Get Your Name Right on Facebook!

Facebook is really handy for tracking down long lost family and friends from your past.

And getting your name right probably seems so obvious that you might not think it worth writing about.

But here’s a tip I discovered a couple of weeks ago.

If your current name is different from the one you were known at school with (such as if you changed your last name when you married), then you should include your birth name in your profile name.

Darn!! I wish I had realised this when I signed up my Facebook account. Because although you can change just about anything else in your profile after your account is set up, you can’t change your name!

So annoying. I’ve had to open another account using my ‘old’ name to that anyone from my past, who might want to track me down, can search on my former name and find me.

What a der-brain I am for not realising this before.

But it is very cool to locate old family and friends with Facebook. I’ve found a couple of cousins from London and hopefully, with my new account in my old name, I might be able to locate some old school friends. How super-cool would that be? To locate an old school friend after many (many, many)decades?

Who knows, they may even be into scrapbooking.

Well wish me luck.

Late Breaking News!

Antoinette from Sparky’s Scratches just told me how I can fix this.

Go into Settings on the top bar of the screen and not only can you change your name, but you can even add a ’secret’ name (eg. your former name) that doesn’t show on your page but is picked up by people who search on that name.

Problem solved!

Thanks a heap Antoinette.

Google wins the Readers Survey

A couple of weeks ago I ran a survey to try and discover where the majority of my readers actually came from.

Now some some readers have been members of the Scraps of Mind community for such a long time that it’s not surprising that they can’t actually remember how they originally found me. After all I’ve been writing this blog for nearly three and a half years, and a few of you have stuck with me from the early days. And believe me, I do appreciate it.

But 36 people did actually have a go at remembering how they found Scraps of Mind and voted on the survey.

Now I generally find that surveys only tend to attract a minor percentage of the total population. But I figure that the percentage of people who do participate are a fairly good cross section of the total. So I’m happy to go with the percentage split of this sample and assume it reflects the total Scraps of Mind readership.

And the results were really interesting.

Click on the graph for a larger view

One of the reasons that I conducted this survey was to see whether all the masses of traffic that flows through Scraps of Mind through Entrecard were actually people who were interested in this blog for its own sake or whether they were all just ‘drop and run’ folk who just hit the site, drop their card and move on. So I stopped dropping on Entrecard a couple of weeks before the survey to see what would happen.

Unsurprisingly my daily traffic dropped significantly. Most heavily active Entrecard users really don’t have time to do more that respond to people who drop on them and don’t really actually get to read the blogs they visit. I totally understand this because I used to be part of the dropping set and when you hit 150-250 blogs a day it’s virtually impossible to actually read many of them. And in fact, I’ve now decided to remove the Entrecard widget from Scraps of Mind and focus on spending more quality time on blogs than just traffic hunting.

So I was really surprised to find that 22% of my readers are people who found me through Entrecard and who have stuck around to visit even though I have stopped dropping. That’s sensational and I thank you and love you all.

I was a bit surprised that only 11% of readers came here through StumbleUpon. I have been pretty active on StumbleUpon over the past couple of years and it has sent a lot of traffic to Scraps of Mind. So I thought that I might have had a higher retention rate that 11%. But for those of you who did stick around, thank you all very much for your support.

But as you can see from the graph, the clear winner as a source of new readers for Scraps of Mind is search engines. In the main that means Google although I’m sure there are other search engines involved too.

Now this didn’t come as a complete surprise to me. I check my Wordpress stats on a regular basis and I get a constant and regular flow of traffic through Google on many of my articles. I try to apply some SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques when I write to give my articles a bit of an edge in the search engines (thank you Blog Mastermind). And the great thing about that is that it keeps on working long after the articles have been posted. I still get new blog traffic on Articles that I wrote over a year ago!

But the important thing for me is that many of you who discovered Scraps of Mind by typing a few words into a search engine have decided that you think it’s worthwhile sticking around and reading on a regular basis.

And for all of you who read Scraps of Mind and especially for those of you who did the survey and who left a comment I’d just like to say a big thank you.

Without you readers this blog is just one woman shouting into the wind.