At the Keywords Essentials class today, Andy was cracking down on us :-) for wasting our precious post titles and site titles on catchy, clever, vague, puns and phrases.
It is so hard to kick this habit!
I'm having to bootcamp myself--notice the no-frills title to this post.
Here are some of Andy's keyword and search engine optimization (SEO) pointers from today's class:
1) Hit Google over the head. In your post titles, be painfully obvious. Google doesn't have a sense of irony or get puns. If you want to get the most bang for your SEO buck, use titles that folks will likely be typing into search engines. Also, readers usually skim the title to see if they want to read your entire post. Posts with straight-forward titles have more of a chance of getting read. Examples of good post titles are: 3 Skype Tips, How to build a membership site, 5 Tricks For Building Blog Traffic.
2) Making the title of your site the remedy that you offer. You have to sort of twist your thinking. When folks are typing stuff into Google, they're looking for solutions to their problems, usually not specific websites. For example, if one of your keyword phrases is "online branding consultants", you could make that the title of your site. This doesn't mean that you can't have a catchy name for your blog; it just means that in the source code your title will appear as "online branding consultants" or whatever your keyword phrase is. You can still make a pretty banner with whatever name you like. It helps to remember that Google looks at your plain, boring source code, not your pretty graphics, when it's deciding where to rank you in the search engine results.
3) Use category names that are keyword-rich. Give your most powerful keywords their own category, even if they seem to repeat a topic. If you look at Andy's blog, you'll see some repetition of topics with slightly different phrasing. What he's doing is sprinkling his keywords in his categories.
4) Use those categories! When you're writing a post, put it in as many categories as possible. Don't use General as a category. It's not helpful. Andy says that posting in many categories helps your site grow exponentially, and the more hefty your site, the more respect it gets from Google.
5) Use your keywords in your linked text. I don't understand how it works, but apparently when Google sees linked text, it pays attention more. This is also true of the titles of photos you use on your site--if you're going to use photos, be sure they're not throw-away titles. Make the photo titles something meaningful and include your keywords.
The idea is to repeat your keywords throughout your blog--in your title, your categories, your post titles, in your content, in you linked text, in the titles of your images.
Like Andy says, getting ranked higher in search engines isn't magic; it just takes being kind of obsessive-compulsive. :-)
To learn more about keywords, checkout this post I wrote about WordTracker, or take a gander at Andy's Keyword Essentials class syllabus and free preview call.
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