Namely, because their name is mentioned in it. But I use that simply as an example, to point out the importance of keywords and headlines when it comes to ranking at the top of the search engines.

Please, don’t get me wrong: Value to your site visitors and potential customers in your content is number one. But they will never be exposed to that value if you do not make some attempt at positioning yourself in the search engines. What this means is that you have to take a bit of extra time to be sure that your headlines, topic, and content all jive with your keywords, and the overall message of your writing. This is true of your site content, and it is true of your blog posts as well.

It’s a bit more work, and some would argue that this advice infringes on the natural creative process. Alas, you are not alone in this quest to publish both for your readers and for the various search engine “spiders” that crawl through your data and give you a ranking based on the now most homogeneous word in the English language, “relevance.” The evolving meaning of that term is a topic for another day, but the short version is that Google ranks sites based on several criteria with an algorithm that is top secret, ever changing, and very difficult to outsmart without cheating, which will subsequently get you unlisted.
Imagine for a second: The grey, old, daily newspaper reporter, who is charged with the task of composing the perfect headline in each piece he writes. He used to have just one criteria: “What will make people want to keep reading?” Now, he too has to consider whether the headline matches the story, and whether he words in said headline are likely to find their way to the top of the search engines. It’s not impossible, it just takes a bit more effort, and adding a dash of science to your already delicious recipe of creativity.

Now imagine the progressive blogger who crafts each post with such precision as to have it attached to the popular tags of the day, and hopes that each of her posts will be “dugg,” on digg, resulting in a landslide of traffic and popularity for her site.

If you’re just starting out, you don’t need to have that kind of diligence, or even have to understand everything I just said in that sentence. (If you did understand all of that, then you should know that to my knowledge , I have never been “dugg,” and this is the first post EVER where I included Technorati tags) I too am learning as I go, and having a lot of fun in the process.

Blog on, friends. Blog on.

Taggy, taggy bo-baggy: SEO, digg, content, blogging

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.