Ways to Keep Our Blog High in Google’s Search Engine Results

Our Research

1. Blog Title (location and frequency of key words)
The reason is blog title will always be shown with h1 tags. If you have your keywords with this tag, it helps you in SEO. Another reason will be the blog title will always be the first word the search bots will go through. If you have the first word of your webpage to be your keyword, it’s easier for you to rank for that keyword too. When you click on the blog title, you’ll notice you’ll reach the home page. That is something that is going happen on each of your blog page- the header will link back to your main page. These helps a lot too. Lastly, when you change your blog title into your keywords, the title tag of the main page will change to your keyword which helps a lot.

2. Speed Blogging
Speed blogging is about updating the blog frequently by publishing 1 or more new posts everyday. If you just started blogging, you can publish once every 3 days and slowly increase to once per day after a month. Speed blogging have many benefits. The main one is that you tell Google and other search engines you update latest information on your blog very often. It also increase your webpages, change large portion of the content on main page, etc.

3. Sitemap
Create sitemap on your blog that shows links to your blog posts. Search engine bots crawl a limited number of links. Having sitemap will create some interlinking power and keep all your blog posts crawlable by the bots. This will help your blog posts stay indexed and allow bots to notice any changes on your blog posts easily.

4. Manual Submission
Google does an extraordinary job of crawling the web and finding new websites. But if you’re impatient or Google just so happens to miss your site you can always submit your URL manually. You can also submit an XML sitemap, which may help your ranking as well, by using Google’s Webmaster Tools. Just use an RSS or Atom feed that is automatically generated by Blogger and Word Press. They can often (but not always ) be found at “yourblogsurl.com/rss.xml” or “yourblogsurl.com/atom.xml.” It's important to understand that simply submitting your blog to search engines doesn't mean your pages will appear at the top of Google search results screen, but at least your blog will be included and will have the chance of being picked up be a search engine.

5. Subscribe to the feeds of your industry’s major players

That way, you won’t miss important news releases. When news breaks in your industry, there will be a lot of extra traffic searching for information on the event. Adding your thoughts will almost always generate extra traffic. Subscribing to the feeds of your industry’s top sites should take no more than15 minutes.

6. Use Links and TrackbacksLinks are one of the most powerful parts of your blog. Not only are links noticed by search engines, but they also act as a tap on the shoulder to other bloggers who can easily identify who is linking to their sites. Linking helps to get you noticed by other bloggers who are likely to investigate the sites that are linking to them. This may lead them to become new readers of your blog or to add links to your blog from theirs.
You can take links to other blogs a step further by leaving a trackback on the other blog to let them know you've linked to them. Blogs that allow trackbacks will include a link back to your blog in the comments section of the post that you originally linked to. People do click on trackback links!

 

7. Submit Your Posts to Social Bookmarking SitesTaking the time to submit your best posts to social bookmarking sites such as Digg,StumbleUpon, Reddit and more can be a simple way to quickly boost traffic to your blog.

Our suggestions

1. Encourage interaction between bloggers and audiences
We can first start by leaving comments on each others’ posts to create a two way communication process.  This is important because every commenter represents the perspective of many others, therefore the comments left behind can teach the bloggers to seek to better understand others’ point of view.  When visitors from outside of our class sees the constant interaction on our blog, they may also be more prone to leave their comments, resulting in the gradual increase in traffic on number of people visiting our class blog.  This may in turn aid in keeping our blog higher on the Google Search Engine.

2. Keywords in content
By using important or terms that are most commonly used among potential publics, they will then be able to find us more easily when they are searching for that term on the search engines.
Using keywords in our blog content enables/helps search engines to categorize our information in their databases.
For example, if potential students are interested in our course “Media and communications”, then in our blog, we should include keywords like these where necessary: business communications, mass comm, media comm, and not dmc because chances of people searching for “dmc” is lower.
Also, before using keywords in our content, we should also make use of Google Adwords Keyword Tool function which allows us to find out what terms people use when they are searching about media and communication-related topics or courses. Once we have ensured that most of the commonly used terms are mentioned in our blog consistently, our blog would rank higher on the search engine when people search about media and communications.
Keywords should also appear in the meta descriptions, meta keywords, alternate tags, headers and link addresses, aside from the blog title.

3. Promoting through WOM
We all know of the very convenient e-WOM, where by word of your site or activities online can be easily spread through using other social networking sites to get more people to find out about it. However, if all methods fail, or if you still haven’t reached your targeted amount of audiences you want reading your blog, your best bet would be to promote it through Word Of Mouth, or WOM. Just by easily asking friends to read your blog, and whilst using the earlier mentioned methods, you would be able to sustain the amount of readers who come to your blog, and maybe even multiply them, when content on your blog is interesting and relevant to the readers.

Done by: Daphne, Dawn, Mayuri, Rachel