Further to the Writers Union of Canada AGM panel RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE

I told you some downsides to podcasting & blogging and I told you some reasons that make me keep doing it. If you begin to get serious about blogging after a while you should also begin to think about SEO.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.

It boils down to doing some things to make Google see your blog more clearly and rank it more highly. It is a mistake to try and design your web presence for Google. Google won’t buy your books. Design it for people. Google is such a successful company because they are so good at getting their search technology to like what real people like. So write your blog for real people.

But once you’ve done that there are a number of other things that, if you’re aware of them, should make Google even happier. I use WordPress for my blog. But I don’t use the free WordPress hosted service. They also provide free software that I can run on my own host’s servers. That other host costs about $7 a month. What that buys me is the ability to plug extra modules (called plugins) into the software to do more than the free service allows. Some of these make it easy to do SEO.

One of the things this allows is addition of more appropriate post titles and keywords for Google to find. Some companies pay money to choose keywords but a simple approach for you to use is to choose words appropriate to your content that lots of people use to search with in Google but for which there are fewer websites out there that contain the keyword. More searches plus fewer competitors means more hits on your site.

Here’s an example:

Imagine an author who writes murder mysteries. I looked up the two key words “murder” and “plot” in separate Google searches. These searches tell me (in the upper right corner) approximately how many web pages there are in the world with those words on them. That’s how big the completion is for each word.

I then used a Google tool called Google Trends (at www.google.com/trends) to look up the same two words. The result at Google Trends shows which word is searched on more frequently.

I can see from these combined results that the word “murder” is a more valuable keyword than “plot” since there are twice as many Google searches on “murder” but there are actually fewer websites that contain the word “murder.”

Another thing that Google likes is links.

If your blog contains links to other blogs and web pages, especially ones that relate to the content of your blog, Google gives you more credit. So as you type, link words in your article to other bloggers and websites.

Similarly if other bloggers and websites link back to you Google is even more impressed. This is called “link love” and I’m going to give you a practical example of it next post.

This blog post is a duplicate of one of a series of emails I’m sending to the Writers Union of Canada listserv in advance of the Writers Union AGM panel session RAISING YOUR PUBLIC PROFILE taking place at 1:15 on Friday May 23. I’ll be joining Cynthia Good and Rick Broadhead for that panel (moderated by Ray Argyle).