Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Get Noticed By Search Engines

Hola Bloggiesta Compadres! That is about as far as my Spanish goes. Chances are if you are stopping by this mini-challenge you want to increase your traffic and you want to reach out to a larger audience than your fellow bloggers.

Bloggiesta, ole, pedro, blogging marathon

Bloggiesta!

So You Want To Get Noticed By Search Engines

1. Read This Post

2. Go to one of your older posts or book reviews. One that needs pizazz.

3. Open up google ad words key word tool. Type in the title of the book you are reviewing or a few keywords related to your post.

4. You see the keywords that have a high number of monthly searches but low competition? Those are keywords that you want to use.

5. Incorporate those keywords in your post or book review.

6. Next, do you have an image? Add an alt tag to it. You can do this in Blogger now as well as WordPress. So if you have a book cover, you will use ‘book cover of title by author’ for your alt tag, so the search engines can index it properly.

7. Next, add a link to one of your older posts on your review. Interlinking gets noticed by the google bots and is one of the best SEO practices you can use for your blog.

8. Next, link out. Find a friend with a relevant post and give them a link. This is good for both you AND your friend according to Problogger. This should help your search engine rankings.

9. Finally, update your post’s meta description. Blogger now has this function too.

  • Don’t keyword stuff.
  • Also, you are going to want to keep it to 150 characters as search engines allow a maximum of 150 characters for the description, so just think about how you would describe your post as though you were tweeting it.
  • Keep your description relevant to your post – i.e. if I was adding a meta description to a review I might say ‘Book review of X by author is the fifth book in X series starring Character R’ modifying to keep it to 150 limit.

You can check this link out for further information.

When you have SEO optimized one of your posts, be sure to come back here and link it!



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April is in her 30s and created Good Books And Good Wine. She works for a non-profit. April always has a book on hand. In her free time she can be found binge watching The Office with her husband and toddler, spending way too much time on Pinterest or exploring her neighborhood.
About April (Books&Wine)

April is in her 30s and created Good Books And Good Wine. She works for a non-profit. April always has a book on hand. In her free time she can be found binge watching The Office with her husband and toddler, spending way too much time on Pinterest or exploring her neighborhood.

Comments

  1. What do you mean by “Don’t keyword stuff.”?

  2. Hope they pick you up!

  3. Thanks April! I had no idea about any of this and now I’m looking into it. I will definitely be doing some of this during Bloggiesta.

  4. I just favorited this post because it’s flippin’ awesome. I’ve been meaning to go back and double check that all my images have alt tags, but holy cow it takes a long time.

    OK, this is going to sound like a silly question, but I figure you’ll know – search engines don’t care about whether words are capitalized, right? I always assumed they don’t – I never use them when searching – but I just need someone who knows their stuff to back me up on this…thanks!

  5. Thanks for posting this. I have been wondering about SEO since I started blogging, but get a little confused when i try to apply it to my reviews and posts. This helps clear up a little of the mystery.

  6. LOVE this post! You’re the guru. One of my Bloggiesta list items is to learn & implement SEO for Blogger and to look into self hosting. I see it coming down the road.

    PS. I love ProBlogger.

  7. Awesome post! I’ve been meaning to look into SEO for a long time. I read ProBlogger too but rarely have the time to implement everything I see there. This challenge (and your previous post) really boils down the subject in a manageable way. The link to the Google Ad Words Tool is priceless! Thank you.

  8. I need to try this! At least I finally understand why this one Titanic book review I wrote a year ago still gets so many hits. Now if I can figure out how to do that for every other review I wrote so they get 2k hits too….

  9. Thank you so much for this post! I’m starting to understand a little bit more about SEO, but you really made it easier for me. I just updated one of my reviews, but I think I’d update more.

  10. Thank you so much for this article! I checked out the W3C Markup Validator, and my blog has a gazillion errors. It’s freaky! The only problem is that I’ve no clue how to fix them. 😐

  11. I will be adding alternate text for every picture in the future. Started with my latest post above and will go back as time permits to update as many as possible. Thank you for the great article.

  12. I just want to let you know that you’ve been TONS of help to me! Thanks for all of the tips and advice!

  13. Thanks for the tips 🙂 I wish there was more SEO stuff I could do on WordPress.com… I’m so tempted to switch to WordPress.org so that I could have plug-ins and things like that, but I just don’t think I can dedicate that much money/time/effort right now. Someday, maybe.

    Great info though. I’m definitely going to be more aware of using key words in my posts, and adding descriptions and stuff to my images.

  14. I’m…kind of in awe of you right now. I know I asked you about SEO several weeks ago, and I’ve been trying ever since to actually do it. I have the All in One SEO pack. But it’s still confusing as heck to me. I just spent about an hour reading that other post and processing the info. I think I’ll have to come back to it a lot before it starts sinking in.

    Anyway, thanks for all the info. You’re awesome!

  15. thanks for this good post. you have sure put a lot of effort compiling all those great stuff in one place. i ve jus started my blog, and i am pretty thankful that i stumbled upon your this post. was a great help to me. love you <3

  16. Great post!

  17. Whew! That was a lot of work. Since I’m on WP.com, I couldn’t follow some of the recommendations. However, what I did get done was: a) set up Google Webmaster Tools, b) add alt-texts to ALL my images, c) went through ALL my posts and added links to other posts on my blogs where appropriate, and d) used Zemanta to improve my tags, external links and add related articles.

    It was a general SEO improvement over my entire blog, so I guess I’ll include a link to the home page: http://blog.socketsandlightbulbs.com/

    Thanks for hosting this!

  18. This was so informative! Thank you so much!

  19. Hi!

    How do I link to my own posts and not just to my blog? My tech skills are seriously lacking!!

    Thanks,
    Heather

  20. I will look at this more closely tomorrow… my eyes are done for tonight. 🙂 I have not read through the comments yet but does this apply to wordpress.com too?

  21. Fascinating stuff here. I had no idea about the alt tags and had been leaving them blank! I am planning on moving to self-hosting later this year and wanted to get a head start on the proper way to optimize posts and this is a good start.

  22. I have learned from trying to find blogger’s reviews to link, that many blogs don’t have search bars and/or review archives…makes me sad. I also know that now I’m going to go through my reviews on Goodreads and supply a direct link back to my blog. A few of my GR friends(including you) do that and always picked you first to link back to.

  23. I’ll be honest, a lot of that sounds confusing to me. I have never really delved into my blog numbers or any of that stuff. However, you have inspired me.

    I mostly concentrate on my YouTube page. I average about 2600 video views a week, but I haven’t even been tagging my shit properly! I could get so many more views. I went in and saw that when I wasn’t giving it a category, it was defaulting to Auto/Cars. Wtf. lol So I’m going through all my videos this week and optimizing them, to see if I get more hits that way. Then I’m going to seriously sit down and work on learning more blog stuff. I’m bookmarking posts like mad during this Bloggiesta thing. lol.

  24. Great post, April! I never knew there were SO MANY things to think about for SEO (beyond the keywords). Good thing I was planning to learn more HTML code this weekend!

    Thanks for taking the time to do head-up this mini-challenge 🙂

  25. April, this is a fantastic post. I have spent several hours reading your post along with a couple of others in order to understand SEO. I think I get it for the most part. I still want to look at ProBlogger and Copywriter.

    It seemed to me that since I have a Book Blog I might apply SEO a little differently. In my reviews, I always include a photo of the book cover but it seems odd to include with it a line that says “Book cover: Title by Author” since it’s pretty obvious looking at it that’s what it is. But I guess for people searching it might be helpful?

    I still have some thing to figure out I guess. I linked to an old review that I tried to update according to your SEO post. I linked to a corresponding book and also linked to a fellow blogger’s review and tried to use my Keywords throughout the post.
    I hope I did this correctly!
    Thank you!

    • The alt text on an image isn’t a description for the person looking at the picture, that’s what a caption is for. Alt text shows up if someone is using a text browser or has their images turned off, so therefore they wouldn’t know what the image was. It is also picked up by search engines so she is telling us to put the book title and author because when someone searches for that book title and/or author and google sees those words in your alt text, it ups the chances they will display your website as a search result.

  26. Awesome challenge! I just updated one of my posts. I had never used the AdWords tool – it’s kind of scary and awesome that something like that is free!

    One thing: I couldn’t figure out how to do the ‘meta description’ in the old Blogger interface. I had the new interface, which probably would have let me do it, but I switched back because it wasn’t allowing me to turn off word verification (which we all know is the devil). Ah well.

    • Yeah you can’t do it in the old blogger but we are all switching to the new blogger very soon, this month. It takes some getting used to.

  27. Thanks for the fantastic information! I think I’ll have to make myself a check list for each new review post after this o.O

  28. Great challenge! I’m just reading this at the tail-end of bloggiesta, but I did take some time today to add some links to other reviews for most of my scheduled posts over the next two months. I’ll have to check out Problogger!

  29. Here is my optimized (ish) post: http://aboutthestory.wordpress.com/2011/03/20/tiralainn/ . I tried to do as many as I could, but since I’m using wordpress.com and I don’t think that I have access to my meta data (so I view sourced a post and saw that there was a meta tag with the first lines of the post, hence the addition of the italics at the top). If I’m just missing some tool for adding that specifically I’d love the help! I got a little confused with some of the instructions about alt tags and such and I think I’m missing some lingo 🙂

    Thanks!
    Anya

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