A lot of my friends and readers ask me all the time: “why doesn’t Google crawl my site?” “how can I make Google index more pages of my site” and the most repeated question “how can I make Google love my blog more?”. Today I am going to answer those questions and share with you some tips that would make Google at least love you more than it used to.
1-Forget Google for a while, yes forget everything about Google and work on your blog as if there is no Google and write for the benefit of your readers. Think about your readers, their needs, their requirements and their user-experience. Eventually when you give out your best and concentrate on the quality of your articles instead of Google’s SEO formulas, you will be gaining a lot of attention from Google’s bot.
2-Access your site from all possible places. A lot of blogs face a compatibility problems, some are minors and others are major problems. You have to test your site from different browsers, operating systems and devices. SteitBlog maybe have a compatibility issue with some certain settings, but so far I didn’t get the chance to detect one, if you are facing any problems viewing SteitBlog, please drop me a line on the “Contact” page or in the comments section below.
3-You will never go from zero to thousands of subscribers in couple of days, it takes time, efforts, quality writing and sometime money. One main ingredient of any blog’s success, is quality writing. From day one, you should be write to your audience as if there millions of subscribers reading your articles, although you are still at the beginning, but quality writing is your key to success, and remember CONTENT IS THE KING.
4-Ask your friends or family members to critic your blog and your articles, they are your only judge, if they like you; you’ll succeed, if they didn’t; you’ll fail. You have to accept critics and do not take them as a negative feedback, at the contrary you could explore new niches and needs within your readers from critics and feedback. You should ask for critic do not wait for it.
5- NEVER use duplicated content! You have to promise yourself to have a very unique content, otherwise you will be banned and panelized from Google and others, and if not banned you will be indexed on pages 200 and above, which I personally think is worse than being banned.
6- A very old activity that a lot may think that it doesn’t work or affect right now, but it doesn’t harm your blog at all. Write proper Meta Information.
7- Make sure that you are using a search engine optimized theme, which is a point that the majority miss. Do you know that a bad theme could easily prevent search engines from indexing your pages (properly)?
8- Take good care of keywords in your titles, articles and the URLs (permalinks) as well. Don’t over use keywords within your article, it will be annoying to the reader and it will effect the core of the article it self. I recommend going with a keyword density between 2% – 6% and stay away from keyword stuffing (an old black-hat trick, where webmasters used to insert all keywords within the footer of the pages setting the colors of the background and the text the same). Also make sure that your permalinks contains the main keywords, that will help a lot in ranking you higher on certain searches.
9- Backlinks. Basically when having 50 sites link back to you, and those 50 sites were crawled by Google bot in less than an hour, then your blog might be as well crawled 50 times in less than an hour. Backlinks will not only increase the speed of crawling, it will also increase your PageRank which means that Google is loving you more. There are several ways to get backlinks other than having your friends linking back to you, such as linkbaits, forums signature, social bookmarking sites, guest blogging, profile at social networks, press releases submission.
10- Use Google webmasters tools, it will help you a lot in setting up your blog and making it search engine friendly. You can check the crawling rate of your site, edit it, edit robots.txt file, submit sitemaps, check errors and their types on your site, monitor your site links internally and externally and much more options.
11- If you are using wordpress, use the Google XML Sitemap plugin, which will handle the creation of Google version of your blog’s sitemap.
My friend Daniel Scocco, the one behind DailyBlogTips, have earlier published an article about the top 25 SEO blogs, you can find it here.
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@SimplicitySqd
October 19, 2009 at 5:56 pmCheck this out for more info on duplicates: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/duplicate-content-and-multiple-site.html
Matt Hart´s last blog ..Believe in Social Media
@ryonaitis
October 19, 2009 at 6:49 pmI think that you can reach back to print media a bit also. If you want to write for a magazine it is always recommended that you read the magazine to determine what kind of articles are usually published. If you submit an article that is nothing like articles being published what are your chances in getting published? Your chances are probably not high. So it does not hurt to look at other blogs that score high in areas you are interested in. and yes as said in the #SteitBlog content is king.
One other example: Personally I wanted to create a site for Microsoft SharePoint Tips and tricks. In a few days I became number 6 on the search engines. Simple reasons,
- Content as this blog post says
- Content that other people will link to
- Understanding the Near principal in information retrieval
And what is in a blog title? Robert Yonaitis – Technology and SharePoint Tips & Tricks
Good Luck every one and another great blog post @steitiyeh
@steitiyeh
October 19, 2009 at 7:02 pmVery realistic examples Rob and I totally agree with you! A lot of people waste their time reading on how to optimize their blog and just miss the main point which all users visit their blog looking for unique and beneficial content!
By notifying popular ping servers monitored by blog search services such as Google Blog Search, you attract search engine spiders to a blog.
I express my deep gratitude for your hard work
@christiantjr
October 22, 2009 at 5:02 am100% agree. It’s so important to just not overthink it. I love that you stepped up and said to just not worry about google for a while. Organic traffic comes, well, organically. It just takes bit of time and work!
Christian´s last blog ..Selling Without Selling
@freenuts
October 22, 2009 at 10:51 amAs mentioned by DailyBlogTips, Google XML Sitemap plugin is mostly used for those blogs which have problem to be indexed by Google, Daniel hasn’t use that plugin in his blog.
Young´s last blog ..Send Free SMS Worldwide from Your Mobile Phone
@steitiyeh
October 22, 2009 at 10:58 am@Young, Thanks for your comment! I agree with you that some blogs will have a sitemap that Google will love more than the ones generated from the plugins, but the case is how many of the bloggers in the sphere are Technical people who can create such sitemaps as Daniel? Daniel is a friend of mine and I take what he say for granted, but most bloggers in the sphere,I am included, do not know how to create such a sitemap. Do you use it for your blog? I think it just save time and headache, that is my case :)
Have a nice day Young
Best,
Steit
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
@luistigre
October 26, 2009 at 1:15 am100% agree with this that you posted. Many times we just don’t care about what we’re writing just thinking that something trendy on youtube or twitter will guarantee more visitors.
We just must focus in our content, just taking care of that, we’ll increase our readers more than our unique visitors.
Pozdrawiam from Poland!
Citizen´s last blog ..Drunkest Guy Ever Goes Shopping
@gloson
October 31, 2009 at 7:33 amI really agree with point #1 – Forget Google.
When I started my blog, http://www.glosonblog.com, I didn’t really cared about google. I just write for people and not for search engines. Then, when I checked my pagerank, it rose from from 1 to 3 and then to 4. Currently, my pagerank is 4.
Gloson´s last blog ..11 Ways to Get More Comments on Your Blog
hello,
thanks for the great quality of your blog, every time i come here, i’m amazed.
@techcrunchies
November 7, 2009 at 4:22 pmVery true Firas..Problem is, despite all this, we are pulled towards seeing results quick and so falter on the way. After 4 years, I have now learnt to tread the difficult path..
Anand Srinivasan´s last blog ..Nice SEO Trick You’ll Like
@extremejohn
November 17, 2009 at 6:41 amThese are all excellent tips for new bloggers as well as pro bloggers or veteran bloggers that want to look for new ways to increase traffic.
Retweeted and voted up on Blog Engage (that’s how I found your site btw).
I absolutely agree with your views. The best way to get indexed by Google is creating a good and unique content. “Content is King and Backlink is Queen” is the way I would always tell it. Getting links from the niche related sites is again a best way to rank soon in Google.
Nice sharing and keep posting.