Stupid Simple SEO – How I Made Page 1 of Google

residubalbacon.com — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 02:13:44 +0000

In 3 weeks I have accidentally made it to the first page of google search. Of course its only when you search for ‘residual income blog’ or ‘passive income blog’. The first time I searched for ResidualBacon on the list when searching for ‘Residual Income Blog’ I scavenged 20+ pages waiting to see it. Never did. 1 Week later I was on the 8th page. 2 weeks later I was on page 2. Now I sit on the first page, and #2 on the list. Here is a Stupid Simple SEO guide.

Crawl like GoogleBot

Googlebot, the robot that crawls the web reading your website, really only has three key functions. These 3 functions are rather simple and here is there definition according to google:

Crawling – Crawling is the when Googlebot discovers new and updated pages that will be added to Google index.
Indexing – compile a massive index of all the words it sees and their location on each page & process information included in key content tags and attributes, such as Title tags and ALT attributes
Serving – search the index for matching pages and return the results we believe are the most relevant to the user

So what can we learn from this? Well that Google just looks at text, organizes it, then searches through it when someone searches for similar text. Simple enough, but how do i use this information to my advantage?

Understand Google Hierarchy

Title -> Description -> Keywords -> Content. I am sure you’ve read before how important your title is when doing SEO, and it is important because that is the first thing Google looks at for relevance. From there it looks at the description, then keywords and finally content. How does google know this information? Through META & ALT tags of course. META tags are placed between the & tags of your web document, and are specifically used to talk to robots like googlebot.

The META Big Hitters:

Title – This will be the title of your web page and is very important for SEO, try to use keywords in your title.
Description – This is a short description of your web page. Once again it doesn’t hurt to use a keyword or two in your description.
Keywords – Keywords are specific words that you are trying to bring users into your site with, if your could sum up your whole web page with one or two words those would be keywords. For instance, keywords for this post would be ‘Blog Tips’ and ‘SEO Tips’

As I said above these live in your web document between the & tags and are specially formated like this:

Your Title Here

Feel free to copy and paste the code above into your own HTML docuement, if your on a blogging platform like Wordpress you can simply use the All-in-one-SEO-Pack.

My three not so secret, secrets:

1 – Use keywords in your description, and in your title if possible. Its easy to use a keyword or two in your description, but not always possible for your title. Use them sparingly though, you don’t need it repeated over and over or that may actually hurt your page rank.

2 – Use google’s keyword tool to research keywords. The google keyword tool will help you come up with keywords and will show how many queries google recieves for those queries. If your keywords are not getting searched, you may want to re-think those keywords.

3 – Update your website! Many people don’t know that if your page is updated constantly then Google will expect updates more and crawl your website more. (Comments count as updates since there is a change to your web page)

I’m no expert, I just use what works.

I am not pretending to be an SEO superstar. I know there are a handfuls of more information on SEO, like using ALT tags for each image, but to me that is a bit tedious. I have used only the information I have posted here to boost my own page rank and I know you can do the same. Just remember:

Crawl like a robot
Understand the Google hierarchy
Use those META tags
Research your keywords
Update your website

As usual I would love to hear your thoughts and comments. Have your own way to improve page rank? Did I miss a tip that can dramatically improve this article? I will update the bottom of this page with the best information from the comments as well as a link to the commentators website.

Anatomy of a Great Blog Post

residubalbacon.com — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:25:16 +0000

Lately I have been reading many blogs and I have noticed that a few blogs have figured out the perfect way to interact with their readers through their blog. The kind of post we all want. A post that draws readers, creates subscribers, and gets a massive amount of comments & social media love. I decided to dissect a post and share my findings with my fellow readers and create a list of questions that you should ask yourself before you hit the big ‘Publish’ button.

Simplicity

It seems the pro bloggers have figured out a whole new language that they write in. Its a simple and understandable way of writing that has a nice flow. This means that you should provide the information you are giving your readers in the clearest manner with as few words as possible. There is no need for useless sentences or re-interpretations, they are only truly after your information so give them just that.

Timeless

Is the information you are posting timeless? Will the information or advice you are sharing going to be relevant in 2 weeks, 2 months, 2 years? While dissecting the posts it seems that most of them were published months ago, yet there were comments from only a couple days ago. This will help build readers as well as build trust. So when writing a new post give your reader a nice timeless piece of information they can go back to and reference from.

Broken Down Visibly

Did you ever wonder why it was so hard to read your college text books? Seeing that wall of text is intimidating and you can’t easily pull information from it. The world is on a 5 second attention span and if your not careful with your posting you may have some killer content, but it will go unnoticed if not broken down properly. This information is nothing new, you want your post to be scan-able. Do this by breaking down your content with:

Use lists like this one.
Headers that define the following paragraphs.
Graphics relevant to your content.
Bolding the most important sentence in a paragraph.

Guide & Reward the Reader

This last information is the most important. Does it guide the reader in anyway? You want the reader to physically or mentally make an action based off of your post, not just be done with the information and start randomly clicking in your website, or even worse, hit the X to close the browser.

You want to reward your readers. Reward them with knowledge they can share, with a good feeling they can relate to. You can even give them an actual reward, many websites have e-books that are rewards for becoming a subscriber. Other websites will reward them with links on their main page. There is a stronger bond between a blog and its readers when rewards are used.

5 questions to ask before you post.

So we’ve talked about the anatomy of a great blog post. Here is a list of questions to ask yourself before you hit that publish button:

Is my post simple and easily understood?

Can I pick out the major points and information of the article in under 5 seconds?

Will the information I am sharing be relevant in 3 days? Weeks? Months?

Does it effectively guide the reader to take action?

Is there a reward for reading my post?

Did I miss any key components to a great blog post? What do you think makes a great blog post? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Reader Suggestions:

Lis Sowerbutts : “I rarely post now without doing some keyword research – I like to know what my post is trying to rank for.”
Jason : “Put you’re most relevant information in the first sentence of a paragraph.”
Niall Harbison : “I find the key to get lots of “loving” on social media is…1.Really good title | 2.Easy scannable content | 3.Something that is useful to your readers”

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