How Google Sees Your Blog
Bloggers put time and energy into making posts informative and entertaining. But from the SEO side, it’s important to ask: how will Google see my blog? Search algorithms change, but Google always looks at certain things in ranking sites. Here’s a birds-eye view of how Google sees your site, presented by a trusted local San Diego internet marketing company.
1. A sitemap is generally an .xml file showing Google how to navigate your site. If you don’t have sitemap.xml in your root directory, there are online tools to generate them. Verify your sitemap is Google-friendly at Google Webmasters Search Console.
A robot.txt file should also be there. It tells crawlers not to index the folders you list with the Disallow hint:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-gallery/
To index everything, don’t use Disallow:
User-agent: *
You should also add your sitemap to robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://mydomain.com/sitemap-path/sitemap.xml
2. Use content-specific keywords: “art” is too vague, but “NY modern art” narrows it down more. Shoot for a density of 2-3 keywords per 500 words of text.
3. Submit your URL to Google Webmaster Tools to ensure Google lists it. Help Google index your site map by navigating to Crawl >> Sitemaps. If the path to your sitemap isn’t there, add it.
4. Title and meta tags should appear in the html <head> section for each page.
<title>Advanced Knitting</title>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2″/>
<meta name=”description” content=”Top dealer for Asian wall art.”/>
5. Google can’t see pictures, but it can see image tags: alt=”” appears if a browser can’t display the image; title=”” is what users see when their mouse hovers over the image.
Make image tags reflect content and keywords.
In going after the top Google rankings through best SEO practices, consider what Google discovers on your site and how you can help Google index it properly.
Learn more about how to make your site Google-ready from the experienced marketing pros at Saba, Inc. in San Diego. Through a combination of SEO, social media, PPC, and web design in San Diego, we help businesses climb the SERPs and drive more traffic to their site. Call us today at (858) 277-1717 and ask about a free website audit!