Well, if SETI is the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, then I figure SEO's gotta be the Search for Extraneous Orangutans or something. (LMNO. . .)
Anyway, SEO is merely a sadistic-sounding acronym for "search-engine optimization." (I've posted an uninformed primer on this subject down below.) Journalism-ista Mark Briggs writes about the importance of SEO in his 2010 book Journalism Next as such: "Remember, you have two audiences online: readers and robots." He goes on to discuss an apparently apocryphal liquid he calls "Google juice," making me think he was either moderately thirsty or exceptionally horny while working on this chapter.
And but so, Briggs's point is just that if you want to get Googled, you have to craft searchable headlines. Think about it. If you didn't know what SEO was (perhaps that's how you got to this page), you'd type in something like "what's SEO?" or maybe just "SEO". If you were looking for "cheap gourmet recipes," you'd type in just that. Your headlines/post titles should reflect this. But crafting searchable headlines is only half the battle: the other half is inticing someone to click on you when you come up in their search results. So add some flavour: "cheap gourmet recipes that totally kick/won't-go-straight-to-your ass." Or some such.
Slightly more advanced is Google Analytics. Create a free account with them (could you have imagined ten years ago how many "free accounts" you would one day have?), and they'll give you a chunk of inscrutable text which you can insert on your blog's template. (Go to Design, click on the Edit HTML tab (you may want to click on Download Full Template, which will save you a copy of your blog in case you screw up the HTML), open the Find on this Page box on your browser (probably under Edit), type </head> into the Find field, go to the space immediately before it, and paste in the chunk of text.)
Go back to Google Analytics after a couple of days to get more data than you can "shake a stick at."
Anyway, SEO is merely a sadistic-sounding acronym for "search-engine optimization." (I've posted an uninformed primer on this subject down below.) Journalism-ista Mark Briggs writes about the importance of SEO in his 2010 book Journalism Next as such: "Remember, you have two audiences online: readers and robots." He goes on to discuss an apparently apocryphal liquid he calls "Google juice," making me think he was either moderately thirsty or exceptionally horny while working on this chapter. And but so, Briggs's point is just that if you want to get Googled, you have to craft searchable headlines. Think about it. If you didn't know what SEO was (perhaps that's how you got to this page), you'd type in something like "what's SEO?" or maybe just "SEO". If you were looking for "cheap gourmet recipes," you'd type in just that. Your headlines/post titles should reflect this. But crafting searchable headlines is only half the battle: the other half is inticing someone to click on you when you come up in their search results. So add some flavour: "cheap gourmet recipes that totally kick/won't-go-straight-to-your ass." Or some such.
Anyhow, Briggs also talks a good deal about analytics [insert sophomoric pun here]. If you have a Blogger blogg, you can get an idea of what he's talking about by going to STATS on your Dashboard and playing around. You'll get a sense of your traffic sources (i.e., which webpages people are on immediately before they end up on your blog), and you can take a peek at a graph of visits to your site. If you don't want to track your own visits (presumably you're not interested in how interested you are in yourself, although you should be) you can check a box and Google will insert a blocking cookie on your browser.
Slightly more advanced is Google Analytics. Create a free account with them (could you have imagined ten years ago how many "free accounts" you would one day have?), and they'll give you a chunk of inscrutable text which you can insert on your blog's template. (Go to Design, click on the Edit HTML tab (you may want to click on Download Full Template, which will save you a copy of your blog in case you screw up the HTML), open the Find on this Page box on your browser (probably under Edit), type </head> into the Find field, go to the space immediately before it, and paste in the chunk of text.)
No comments:
Post a Comment