SEO and Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
How Does Google Rank Blogs? A lot different that you think!
Google
does not rank blogs anything like you think they do. What we think of
as SEO does NOT work for blogs. For months I have been chasing Google
with incoming links, social marketing and keyword SEO in my blog. Then I
discovered how Google really ranks blogs and what it can mean to your
blog traffic.
Let's look deep into the Google patent and see how SEO really applies to blogs and Google.
In this article...
1. How Google Really Ranks Blogs and Blog SEO
2. By the number of blog readers you have in Google Reader and Technorati.
3. By how many blogrolls you are in and the quality of the linking blog.
4. By how many times your Google search engine listing is clicked.
5. By social bookmarking posts and the number of times you are Dugg etc.
6. The number of times your URL appears in conversations.
7. The quality of the links in a blog article and the quantity of links.
Google judges your blog by the number of blog readers you have in Google Reader and Technorati.
Yes, Google is reading your RSS reader.
From the Google Patent:
"The
popularity of the blog document may be a positive indication of the
quality of that blog document. A number of news aggregator sites
(commonly called "news readers" or "feed readers") exist where
individuals can subscribe to a blog document (through its feed). Such
aggregators store information describing how many individuals have
subscribed to given blog documents. A blog document having a high number
of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document. Also,
subscriptions can be validated against "subscriptions spam" (where
spammers subscribe to their own blog documents in an attempt to make
them "more popular") by validating unique users who subscribed, or by
filtering unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the subscribers."
I
other words, Google is judging you by the number of subscribers you
have in Google Reader. Google reader owns about 60% of feed reader use.
To calculate the other 40% they just do the math. Definitely the number
of subscribers you have in
Technorati is an indication of you blogs reach and popularity.
To
see how many subscribers you have in Google reader, look on the left
side of the page for "+ Add Subscription." Click the button and a search
box will open up. Enter the name of your blog, not the URL, and a list
of blogs will appear in order of readership in descending order.
You may want to use "" around your blog name to slim down the results.
Blog SEO Solutions
Add
a Google button to you site prominently on the top right of the page. I
am currently testing adding the Google button to my email newsletter
popup forms.
Here is the add to http://www.google.com/webmasters/add.html Google Reader button wizard.
The Technorati button is a little more hard to find so I am just going to post the code here.
Here
is the Technorati image Just right click the image, select "save
picture as" and save it to your images folder. Then upload it you your
site. Adjust the img src= path in the code.
img src="http://www.keywebdata.com/images/technorati.gif"
Here is the add to [http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php] MyYahoo button wizard.
Also a lot of skilled bloggers are adding a "if you found this post useful why not add my RSS feed" link at the bottom of posts.
Google ranks your blog by how many blogrolls you are in and the quality of the linking blog.
From the Google Patent:
"Similarly,
the existence of the blog document in a blogroll of a well-known or
trusted blogger may also be a positive indication of the quality of the
blog document. In this situation, it is assumed that the well-known or
trusted blogger would not link to a spamming blogger."
So let's talk blogrolls. Think of this as the friends list of blogs. Three factors come into play here.
The number of times your blog is listed in blog rolls. Quantity matters.
The quality of the other blogroll members in blogrolls you appear in.
The quality of the blog that adds you to their blogroll.
Do
not trade recipricol links with other blogs in blogrolls. Google puts
more weight on incoming one way links that do not return the favor and
link back.
You want to appear in powerful authority laden
blogrolls. You also want your blog roll to be nothing but #1 rated blogs
about your blog topic.
Blog SEO Solutions
This is not reciprocal linking here. In fact there is some evidence that reciprocal blogroll linking can hurt your blog.
Google ranks your blog by how many times your Google search engine listing is clicked.
Punch up that title tag, it is really your search engine headline.
From the Google Patent:
"An
implied popularity may be identified for the blog document. This
implied popularity may be identified by, for example, examining the
click stream of search results. For example, if a certain blog document
is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears
in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is
popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog
document."
Have you ever searched a term and gone back and searched it again and the top results were different?
That is Google testing the pulling power of the title tag of your post and the snippet that Google pulls from your body text.
Believe me Google watches everything we do.
Blog SEO Solution
Turn
your title tag into a benefit laden headline. Either craft the title
tag to include a benefit to the reader of use a little scare tactics by
defining a problem that a searcher is looking to solve.
The latter
is best. People are not proactive, they do not look to head off
problems. They use search engines to solve a problem they already have.
I am writing this page because my blog did not rank well in Google. You are reading this because yours did not either.
Did
either of us search Google to find out how what we could do to get our
blog ranked well before we noticed that we were not doing well in SERPs?
That
is why I used the title tag on my post "Why blogs don't rank well in
Google." Because that is the phrase that I used to find the original
content that I started blogging about.
Google ranks blog by the
number of social bookmarking posts and the number of times you are Dugg
etc. Social marketing definitely effects SEO.
From the Google Patent:
"Tagging
of the blog document may be a positive indication of the quality of the
blog document. Some existing sites allow users to add "tags" to (i.e.,
to "categorize") a blog document. These custom categorizations are an
indicator that an individual has evaluated the content of the blog
document and determined that one or more categories appropriately
describe its content, and as such are a positive indicator of the
quality of the blog document."
Google is definitely not just
tracking the number of listings in social bookmarking sites like Digg,
StumbleUpon, Delicious and Blinklist.
Google is tracking how many times we are dugg, the tags that are used in the original Digg and the quality of the user.
Have
you ever noticed that Digg posts do not show up in a links check? They
will when you have at least five to ten Diggs or the Digg page itself
and will show up in a keyword search even sometimes above your original
article.
Google ranks blogs by the number of times your URL appears in conversations.
Think Gmail....
From the Google Patent:
"References
to the blog document by other sources may be a positive indication of
the quality of the blog document. For example, content of emails or chat
transcripts can contain URLs of blog documents. Email or chat
discussions that include references to the blog document is a positive
indicator of the quality of the blog document."
Yeah, Google reads your Gmail. Google listens to your Google chat. All the time counting how many times your URL is present.
Blog SEO Solution
This
is a good case for not using tracking links in emails to your list. By
using click counting URLs to see how count click thrus to your site you
may be removing a positive indicator that Google counts.
Google ranks blogs by the quality of the links in a blog aritcle and the quantity of links.
SEO also is effected by the link text in these body text links.Don't be scared to link to other blogs.
I
am also thinking that the quality of blogs that you link to in the body
text has a lot to do with your blog and your posts' ranking.
I feel that Google thinks if you are unwilling to link to blogs better than yours then you are not sure of your own content.
It
is also possible that the number of links in a blog document (or lack
of) says to Google that you are just building landing pages that are
worthless rather than writing a well researched article using a number
of authoritative sources as background.
While not mentioned in the Google patent there does seem to be evidence that using Feedburner helps your Google rankings.
Since Google acquired FeedBurner, just using Feedburner analytics seems to increase your SERPs position.
Obviously
if the more subscribers you have in Google reader helps your rankings
then the greater the number of subscribers that Feedburner tracks has an
effect too.
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