Are you wondering how Google sees your blog?   Why SEO is so important for Google?   Well, no one likes to blog to an empty room.  Beyond your social media platforms and our amazing e-mail newsletters, your biggest source of readers will come from search engines, specifically Google. While, search engine optimization (SEO) is a huge topic one of the quickest things you can do to help Google offer your pages in search is to understand how Googlebots, Google’s little virtual minions, read your page.

All those painstakingly edited photos? Useless. Carefully considered font combinations? Google could care less. That expensive or hair pullingly coded JavaScript picture slider added to your blog? Googlebots don’t even register them as they wander past.

What Google Can See

Text and various HTML elements.  That’s about it.

If you use Blogger, then your post interface does a good job of only giving you the important items for your blog: Title, Headings, Subheadings and Text. WordPress .com will throw a lot more options at you:  Six headings, Categories, Asides, etc.

Self-hosted WordPress can quickly get crazy with a few plugins and you find yourself are dealing with meta-descriptions, keywords, post slugs and… oh my goodness… who has time to fill all that in?

Guess what?  You don’t need to!

What Google Will Focus On

1. Blog Title: Your blog needs a title (found under settings).  The title shows in the tabs of a web browser, is picked up by RSS readers, and is used when people search for your blog by name.
2. Post Titles: I like a catchy title, but honestly, Google wants a descriptive title. †Focus on using words that describe the post.
3. Headings: If you are using WordPress the heading numbers correlate directly to HTML. Best way to think of them as headings and subheadings. They are meant to tell Google and human readers what is important and break up your post. They are NOT meant to be used to make text bigger or give emphasis to a word.
4. Text: Specifically the first 150 or so words.  (This is why you shouldn’t put your image first…read more on that here) That long preamble or conversation at the beginning of your post? Google does not care if you are friendly, it wants to delve into the meat of your article. Try to summarize your post or use keywords in those first few sentences. Google will often but not always, use them as the excerpt for the search.
5. ALT text*: You know all those pretty pictures that Google cannot see? Well ALT text solves this for you. Write a short (sentence at most) description of what that image is all about. This helps index the picture in Google’s image search, allows Google to read the image, and gives users an idea of what your picture is if they cannot view the actual image.

*ALT text is the one thing Blogger is a pain about. You have to put the image in your post then click and add the alt text under properties.  Wordpress allows you to add alt text when you upload the image.

In Conclusion

All the pretty layouts, images, and clever writing are what keeps readers coming back to your blog but it is important to give thought about how people can find you. Take a moment to look at your blog. Do your social media icons have alt text? What about your menu buttons? Are you using descriptive titles and making your first paragraph really count? These are your first steps in making each post Google-Friendly. Make changes and the next time Google sweeps your blog you will be ready for it to showcase your posts.

Brianna Willis works in information technology (IT) by day and craft blogging by late night. All other hours are devoted to her two small sons, family, and laundry. You can read more about her at, Craft Thyme, her blog that focuses on step by step seasonal craft tutorials and displays.

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Did you ever notice that it seems that Google may be avoiding your blog?   Its true!  You want to get noticed by Google, not be avoided, right?

Have you ever looked at your stats and wondered why you are not getting much traffic from search engines, or your traffic is sporadic at best?

These simple things that you could be doing, will have google avoiding your blog like the plague!   I was doing a few things wrong, but once I fixed them, I found that Google went from being not even in my top 10 of referring traffic… to in my top three!

Wondering what makes search engines avoid your blog? Here are a few places to start:

1. Duplicate Content –
   Search engines are always on the look out for duplicate content because there are so many “scraper” sites out there.People who put websites up and, instead of coming up with their own ideas and thoughts, they just steal the work of others. Google (and other search engines) send out little spiders that crawl through sites and check for this. Since these are bots, and not people, even if you are re-using a post with permission, the little bots won’t know that.One or two duplicate posts might not be an issue, but you certainly don’t want to make a habit of it. If you allow guest posts on your site, make sure that you are receiving an exclusive piece, and not something that has already been done on their blog or some one else’s.  I always ask this ahead of time (“Is this being used anywhere else on the web?”)  It could be damaging for both blogs if you are running the same piece, so it’s in every one’s best interest to keep content new and exclusive!If you guest post somewhere, instead of sharing the entire post on your site, you could consider sharing a “teaser”, with a few sentences about your post, and then direct your readers to the site where you are posting that day. It’s a great way to still be able to share your guest content with your readers, without jeaprodizing your relationship with the search engines.
2. Selling Links
    This is also a big no-no, and one that is not talked about enough! From time to time you might be contacted by a company wanting you to add their link to one of your posts in exchange for money. While this might seem like easy money, you need to be cautious, because this practice goes against google’s terms of service.Simply because it creates a poor experience for the user (the search-er) if sites are showing up high in search rankings because they have paid to be there, instead of earning their spot by having quality content. This is why it is so important to use the “nofollow” code when putting links in your sponsored posts.This tells google’s bots not to pay attention to that link or rank the site any higher in searches because of it. Here’s a great article from google about how “nofollow” works, if you need some help there. Keep in mind, you are still able to link to other sites within your posts. These links should just be natural in your writing, and not something that you are being paid to do. It’s perfectly fine to link out from your blog, it is typically just frowned upon when you are doing it for profit instead of to provide a positive experience for your readers.
3. Allowing Spam Comments
   Although you are not the one writing them, allowing spam comments to be published on your blog (and remain there) can also negatively affect your standings with the search engines.A lot of comments are clearly spam, but also be on the lookout for comments from real people that are spam-y. Lots of commenters are “link droppers” and just ask you to visit one or more of their blogs, without adding any real content to the conversation about your post. This can also be counted as spam, so you may not want to allow them to be posted.
4. Dead Links – Linking out to pages that no longer exist is another big one. It’s important to make sure that pages on your site, and pages that you link to lead to helpful pages and not a dead “error” page.Search engine bots look at these things as well and your site will be seen as lower quality if it consistently pulls up pages that do not exist (because you deleted them) or links out to things that are no longer there.

If you have been doing any of these things, the good news is, that they are pretty easy to fix!
Example:  If you have posts that were duplicates of guest-posts, just convert them to teaser posts so that they won’t be dead links, etc… 

Were you making any of these mistakes? How can you go about fixing them?

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