How to rank your blog on Google

How to rank your blog on Google

Ranking your blog on Google is not as complicated as you may think. As blogs have become popular as a medium to drive traffic to your website, more people are now asking” How do I rank my blog on Google?” and “I thought blogs were search engine friendly, so shouldn’t my blog rank on Google?”. The answer to these questions is yes- and no.

Blogs are designed to be search engine friendly by allowing you to “tag” your articles (or posts) with keywords. There are also many plugins available for blogs (especially WordPress) that add the well known “meta tags” fields to your posts, which help in terms of search engine optimization. However, this is not all. By just adding search engine optimization plugins and thoughtlessly tagging your articles with keywords will not achieve the desired results; a lot more thought and knowledge needs to go into optimizing your blog. Think of it this way: you have the car, now you need to select the right type of oil and gas to get the car going at optimal performance.

Start by tagging your articles correctly. This means you need to select as few as possible keywords as tags for your articles. I know what you must be thinking now: ” Is this guy crazy? I’ve heard the more keywords the better!” or ” I want to rank for multiple keywords, so I’m going to use as many as possible”. If you do this, you may as well forget about ranking your blog on search engines.

Tag, or keyword, selection is crucial to ranking your blog well on search engines. If your article is about website design for example, tagging the article with “e-commerce” or “CMS” is quite pointless- you’re better off writing dedicated articles about those topics. Yes I know, E-commerce is a type of website, but it technically has nothing to do with the article topic (website design). Search engines are not as intelligent as people think they are: they follow specific rules when indexing and ranking websites. In the eyes of the search engine, “E-commerce” is different from “website design”. I know if you perform a Google search on “website design” you will find links that mention “E-commerce” as well- this brings me to the second point: description and content.

Your blog’s text content (i.e. your article) needs to be written in a search engine friendly way to start ranking on search engines. This means you need to select a topic and stick to that topic in the article. If you have a lot to say on a similar or related topic, write a dedicated article for that. After you have written your article, try and ensure your main keyword shows around 5-7% of the entire text body. Also, make sure your article page is named after the main keyword. These 2 points greatly help your chances of ranking well.

Lastly, refer to my other article about starting a blog for a list of repositories and directories to submit your RSS feed to. After all, you need to get the word out there that your new blog exists!