Search Engine Optimisation

1. Keywords

The ‘header’ of a blog refers to its title. In this case, it is called ‘Sharing is Caring’. We should have something that is more directly related with regards to the phrase ‘Social Media’. Being creative about titles is one thing, but the current title has slightly deviated from the sole purpose of social media. It is about sharing but not so much about caring.

When social media news or articles are being searched for, the keywords which people normally use are ‘social media articles/news/sites’ or ‘social networking articles/news/sites’. We could try changing our site header to something which contains ‘Social Media’ or ‘Social Networking’. From there, we could then throw in a few more words to spice it up.

For post titles and post contents, we could try to have more articles which contain ‘Social Media’ or ‘Social Network’ rather than articles talking about social media/network but with minimal or no mention of those two words.

2. Information about Module, Course, School.

Currently, the blog only consists of one column, which is the blog entries itself. For outsiders who are not taking the Social+Media module, they would not understand the purpose of the blog and the people behind it.

We propose to add a column, titled ‘About Us’. As the title suggest, it will contain details of:

• The purpose of the blog
• A short write-up of the Social + Media module.

An example would be:

“Hi and welcome to our blog!
If you’re wondering what this blog is all about, don’t fret! Everything you need to know is here:

Who are We?

We are the current students of Social + Media module, an elective for Year 2 students enrolled in the Diploma of Media and Communication in Singapore Polytechnic.

As part of our module, we have created this blog as a platform to share any interesting news regarding the ever-expanding social media world. Additionally, we also use this blog to hand in our assignments. Tech savvy, huh? ;)

Social + Media

Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Blogs. What are the chances that you have never stumbled on one of these websites? It seems that social media is fast advancing to become the most preferred choice of media.

Social + Media is one of the new electives introduced to Diploma of Media in Communication.
Through this module, students are taught to take one step ahead and utilise the social media to spread awareness, generate buzz and even shape the perception of both individuals and brands. This elective teaches students of the wonders of what social media can do that traditional media like tv, print and radio could never achieve. “

3. Tags
- Put tags to every blog entry.
While our current entries are tagged, the tags are brief and basically does a general summary of the topic of the blog post. However, our posts are usually more detailed and covers more than just one or two topics at a time. For instance, a post on Facebook and major companies like BBC NEWS picking it up for corporate use might just be tagged “Facebook” and “Corporate”. However, as it involves other matters such as journalism and technology.

4. Links

One way to increase the prominence of the blog is to make use of links. For example, using cross links between pages or posts within the blog will increase its visibility. Also, we can invite others to visit our blog by creating backlinks in other similar websites. Constant traffic will add the popularity of the blog. For example, the main SP domain site may link their website to us, and vice versa. This way, we will be helping each other to increase traffic.

5. Regular Updates

One of the ways to boost Search Engine Optimization is through regular updates. Search engine results are usually shown in chronological order, hence the more recent updates a blog has, the higher the chances of it showing up on the first few pages.

6. Dead Links

There should be a mini application or tool next to every link which exists on the side for visitors to report any ‘dead links’. This is so that we are able to do something about the link instead of letting it stay ‘dead’ and hence leading to a decrease in our rank in the search engines.

Alternatively, there is a site called LinkTiger: http://www.linktiger.com/ This site checks for broken links in our blog and notifies us with detailed reports for any broken links.