In 2011, I will update my blog more often.
As a writer, I study ways that I can encourage more people to read my work online. One way to do this is to write so that the search engines find it. The more relevant the search engines think this blog is to internet users’ queries, the higher up on the page this blog appears on the search engine results.
People are impatient. The closer a website is to the top of the first page, the more likely they’ll click on it. If they click on my site, bingo! I have more readers!
This process is called search engine optimization.
If I know that a lot of people search on the term “LinkedIn,” I can use the word “LinkedIn” and any synonyms I can think of, frequently within the post. “Aha!” the search engine says to itself, “this post must be really relevant to the query because it concentrates on the subject—look how many times the word LinkedIn repeats. I’d better recommend this page to people who want to learn about LinkedIn.”
Another way that the search engines check web pages is to see how many other web pages refer to it. If a lot of other people recommend my page to their readers, my page must be good. This is especially true if the website that refers to it is prominent.
I use this fact to a certain extent. My LinkedIn profile includes a link to this blog. If I think my friends might be interested in a certain post, I also mention it on Facebook. If I wanted to, I could visit strangers’ blogs, leave comments there and include a link back to this blog. I don’t usually bother. I do have an offline life.
Another thing the search engines look at is how frequently the website is updated. If nobody updates the website, the search engine figures it’s been abandoned or that the information on it’s outdated. Search engines want to see sites with frequent changes.
I like this blog to have good search engine results, which is why I vow to update it more often this year. Thanks for visiting, and y’all come back now, you hear?
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