Improve search terms for my blog

shadowane

I started a blog a little over a month ago and want to be able to search it properly through Google. I realize it hasn't been that long and there isn't anyone out there linking to it, but I'm wondering if there are any legal (as in not against Google's rules) to improve the search terms that find it. Any suggestions?

BoomShake

First off, set up Google Webmaster Tools. This will give you a more comprehensive overview on how you're site is being handled by Google. Included in the statistics is the set of keywords, ranked by "relevance", associated with your site. When enough search data is gathered, there are graphs and tables regarding specific searches, your place in the results, clickthrough, etc.

You seem to know the two major obstacles for frequent, reliable indexing: time and in–links. There's a shitload of stuff on the net and limited resources. The longer you're around and posting new, unique content, the better you'll be indexed moving forward. A month is nothing at all. The incoming links are quite necessary. Not only do they show to Google that your content is popular and important enough to be indexed more frequently, but it provides pathways for the spider to find your site.

Keep posting, stop worrying.

What blog software are you using (or is it custom)?
Do you have a sitemap?
Have you done any SEO?

Also, check out Google Webmaster Guidelines to make sure you've got the site itself up to spec.

shadowane

It's just a blogspot blog. I don't have a sitemap, but I've looked at the robots.txt and it indexes everything useful on the site. I haven't done any SEO (search engine optimization I assume?) since I'm just blogging.

I figured just posting often and getting people interested and linking to the site are what I need to do but I wanted to make sure there wasn't anything else I could do.

Aurin

That is pretty much all you can do for SEO for Google. As long as your keywords in your meta tags are correct, just keep on using word of mouth. The more people linking to you, and you linking to them, the faster you'll shoot up those search results. There's only so much keywords can do for you with google, and it's not much.

BoomShake

I hope you meant that the robots.txt allows access to the entire site to the google spider, and not that robots.txt indexes anything. At any rate, that has nothing to do with whether you should have a sitemap or not. Sitemaps provide a handy index to help crawlers. They make sure the crawlers know about every page from the get-go, can make suggestions on the update frequency of pages and priority of importance, inform the crawler when the pages were last changed, etc. A sitemap is your best bet to have a search engine learn about your entire site. I'm not familiar with Blogger, but there are plugins to generate and update it automatically for Wordpress.

(White hat) SEO is going to help no matter what content you're providing. Things like canonical urls, page titiles to be rewritten so that it's "Page - Sitename" instead of "Sitename - Page", complete and unique META data for every post and page, using noindex for archives and such (to reduce redundancy), etc. It makes it easier for the crawlers to properly handle the content it's seeing.

For incoming links, you can do some of the initial legwork yourself. Link to it from your facebook, your twitter, google profile, etc. Put a link to it in forum signatures. Comment on other blogs and use your link. If you've got any friends with websites, exchange blogroll links. The only important thing is: Don't be obnoxious or pushy about it if don't want people dismissing it out of hand.

shadowane

What I meant by robots.txt was that the link it has to index the page by displays all the text from the page. I realize what it's for mostly but I may not be explaining properly. I'll see about doing some of the other things you suggested though. Thanks.

Echo

Aurin wrote: »

As long as your keywords in your meta tags are correct, just keep on using word of mouth.

Most serious search engines don't give a shit about keyword metatags any longer, because they were way too easy to stuff for scummy SEO purposes.

shadowane

I'm not generating specific html for the site (I just let it generate the html mostly) since it's just through blogspot so unless they do something specific with keywords I'm not doing anything like that right now.

BoomShake

If you're not able/willing to tinker with how the site itself is generated/presented, I'm curious what you thought you could get out of this thread besides what you already knew.

Darkewolfe

In-bound links to content that shares relevant keywords between both sites is the absolute most important thing you can do.