How do I Get My Blog to Show Up in Google?
As blogging continues to grow in popularity and more and more people are starting their own personal blogs, one question continues to be asked frequently, “How do I get my blog to show up in Google?” While there isn’t one simple answer to solve this question, I can offer a few tips to help a blog get discovered by Google.
Choose a Good Blogging Platform
There are many different options to choose from when setting up a blog. Some of the most popular platforms today include Drupal, Joomla, Blogger and WordPress. Each of these platforms have their own features and control panel that make them easy to use for even beginner level bloggers. Many hosting services will include easy installations of these popular blogging platforms and can even offer help with the installation or advice on which platform to use. However, out of all these options, WordPress stands out as being the most search engine friendly. WordPress includes built-in features to allow a person to optimize their pages to be found and indexed easily.
Use Good Plugins
Many of the popular blogging platforms will have built-in features to help optimize content for search engines. Blogger and WordPress allow users to create custom titles, meta descriptions and add tags to posts. They also make it very easy to categorize and organize the blog posts. Even with features like those, it is important to find plugins that will allow for complete optimization of the content. A good plugin for SEO is the All-in-One SEO Pack which allows many more advanced optimization options. It even automatically does a lot of the optimization so beginners don’t have to worry about it and can just focus on writing for their blog.
Get Socially Connected
Part of getting into Google’s search results is getting content shared on popular social networks. It is important to use a blogging platform that makes it easy for readers to share content that they like, on popular networks like Facebook and Twitter. Many blogging platforms now include social sharing features that will place quick sharing buttons with the content on blog posts. If the platform does not include those buttons then popular third party applications like AddThis can be used to add the buttons to the blog.
When blogging, the most important thing to remember it to write often. Google loves fresh content so writing new posts as often as you can, will keep giving Google fresh content to crawl. Writing often will also keep followers coming back to see the latest posts. That in turn will help to get more subscribers and increase the likelihood of blog posts being shared on social networks. It will all play together to help bring more visitors to the blog and help it to show up better in Google searches.
About the Author: Dustin Williams is a Search Engine Marketing expert and the Global SEO Manager for MidPhase, a domain registration and website hosting services provider. He has been practicing SEM and optimizing websites since 2004. Follow Dustin on Twitter: @WebGazelle.
