(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
When your blog is live - which may happen in the near future, or may have happened months or years ago -, your blog will certainly be crawled by search engines like Google. After it happens, people may see your blog, or particular pages from it, as results when they search for words or phrases in the aforementioned search engines.
It follows from that that it is desirable for your blog - all of it - to be correctly indexed. And there are some basic things you can do to help.
(There are also more advanced things - there are even ridiculously expensive books and courses on how to make sure your site appears at the top when people search for related words - that’s called “Search Engine Optimization”, or SEO. But this entry doesn’t go into that.)
- Use a robots.txt file, uploaded to the root of your site (it should be available at
http://yoursite.com/robots.txt). That file tells search engines what not to index. Search engines tend to “respect” more the sites that have that file. It can also prevent the engines from showing “internal” stuff to users, like your statistics pages. You can find instructions for creating such a file at robotstxt.org.As an example, here’s mine. As you can see, it’s a very simple one:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
- Put the subjects in the titles. We always have the temptation of using “clever” subjects, or subjects which lead on into the entry text, but are meaningless by themselves. I’m guilty of doing that myself, using titles like “Well…” or “Yes, but…” in older articles on other blogs. It may even look “cool” to someone who’s already reading your blog… but using “proper” titles (they don’t have to be serious or formal, but should include whatever it is that your entry is about) will increase the number of your visitors. A lot.
- Another one I keep missing: use descriptions of the links (both internal and external) as the link text. In other words, avoid doing something like
<a href="site.com">this</a>, which creates a link called simply “this“. Instead of “this”, use something like the site’s name, the article’s name, your short description of the article’s content, etc.. - Enable permalinks, if your software/server allows you to. Permalinks make your URLs look a lot nicer, such as “site.com/my-holidays/” instead of “site.com/blog.php?page=428″. Not only does it make your blog much more readable for your readers, but search engines work much better with that, because with the non-permalink way all your entries could be misinterpreted as a single page.
- Make your site inter-linked: most blogging software does it automatically, but if it doesn’t, do it yourself. All article pages should have a link to the front page, which should have either links to all the articles, or links to lists (usually called “archives”) to all the articles. If needed, create a “site map”, a page with links to every single article in your site, like an index.
- Check your spelling. I’ve mentioned this one before, but it’s also important for search engines. If you misspell some word, people will only find your site in a search engine if they happen to misspell it exactly the same way.
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Quick question if you don’t mind.
If you’re using a blogger default template can one assume that the site is properly inter-linked?
I’m more writer than techno-geek… although I fail at the first often and pine for success at the latter….
A little housewife speak would go a long way on making this more readable.
What I mean is, can you dumb this post down a little for me?
Housewife: as to the first question, the answer is yes.
As for the rest… sorry, but I don’t see how this post could be more “dumbed down”. If you have doubts about a particular point, let me know, and I’ll do my best to answer.