Arthifis’ Classroom: Getting More Google Hits! – First Class

Hey everyone and welcome to our place!

Something that I’ve always loved was to teach other people! So, here’s a new series! It will be called Arthifis’ Classroom and I’ll use this to teach all sort of things! Probably I will go more towards the digital marketing (the thing I am trying to do a career if I can’t to the jump of having a blogging career) and some WordPress tips and tricks 😉

Just want to say from the start that I’m not a guru or nothing like that! I’m just going to give you some guidelines of what I’ve learnt in theory and then in practice! Nothing less nothing more xD

Today we will be discussing Search Engine Optimization, SEO for short. Something you need to be at least a little bit concerned if you want to have Google views. This tips will be towards blogging and things that you can do for free (I’ll only have one that isn’t free which will be the first one). So, let’s start it!

– Have your own Dominion –

Here it is, the only paid one! For you to have your own dominion you will need to have to invest some of your money! Here in WordPress.com you can buy it or if you upgrade to personal one of the things you will get is your own dominion. Of course there other ways to get this outside of WordPress, so I won’t talk about those…

It’s pretty simple! Think for a moment that your blog is a store. If you have a dominion it’s like having a store nearby the sidewalk where people pass and may (or may not) enter.

As it is, meaning, if you are a free loader like me, then at the moment your blog is a subdominion of WordPress. You can think that WordPress is a really big store and inside of it, right in the back it’s you store, meaning, your blog.

It doesn’t need a genius to understand that the Google robot will push more to the top stores that are right in the sidewalk than the ones that are at the end of a big store.

– Visuals –

What I want to say about Visuals is Pictures and Gifs that you may use in your blog. First of all those are great for making a 1000 post way easier to read since your readers’ sight will be able to rest for sometime while looking at those. Moreover, if you enter a site from google and everything you see is text you will just probably run away! So, for that using visuals is really important in blogging. But, there’s more! Visuals can help your SEO, if done right!

Now, what ranks our little blogs is a robot, not a person and therefore you can put the image that completely makes sense to have in the post you’ve just written, but, if you don’t clearly state what image is that google robot won’t know what that is!

Google Robot reads the HTML of the site and HTML is programming, so no pics there! What will appear there is the source of your image (which probably will be your images’ bank in WP). In that source it will be the name of the image.

So think about it, let’s say you are doing Natsume Book of Friends review (I’ve just watched an episode that’s why I remembered that one). You go on google and try to find a nice gif. You find it, download it and immediately upload it to your post not even changing the name… Well, most of the cases it will have a name like “kdsdakdokwldkasl” (yeah, those are just random letters). Well, what do you think Google Robot will do with that image? If someone searches for kdsdakdokwldkasl it will appear… But that’s not really what you want right?

So instead of that change the pic name. It could be “Natsume Book Of Friends review cute nyanko-sensei”. There you have a strong name where you are repeating your keyword “Natsume book of friends review” and adding another part that explains what your pic is about.

But that’s not the end of it! You can still go even further. If you go to edit your pic you will see that there is a place for you to put alternative title or “alt” title (it depends in the place you are). Well, here you can write another title for the pic! How cool is that? Normally I just go with the same name for both titles. Normally sites don’t really go well when you have special characters in the name of the pic, so normally I write the name I want without those characters and then I’ll write in the alt title the name written with the missing characters.

Here’s an example, the pic above in my html is:

“

src=”https://arthifis.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/how-to-have-more-google-hits-google-robot. gif”

alt=”How to have More Google Hits Google Robot” width=”500″ height=”281″ />”

(I had to had the space in Gif, if not the WP would just insert the pic)

As you can see, with that pic I was able to use my keyword and add also the google robot part!

– Number of Words –

There is no kind of magical number for this one! There are people who says the minimum is 300, others 500, others 1000… Well, just go with the minimum and write at least 300 words by post. Why? Don’t really know, but it seems Google Robot thinks that more than 300 words gives more interesting content!

– Keywords –

No, I’m not talking about metatags… That thing that everyone was using but nowadays don’t really matter anymore! I’m talking about keywords for your post.

Using the same example, if your keyword is Natsume Book of Friends Review you need to have that in some places (being the title an obvious one!). Basically the keyword should be the combination of words that you want your post to be about and more importantly how you think people will search for that theme in Google.

So let’s say instead of writing “In this Anime you have a guy and a cat who is in fact is a god” you can write “In Natsume Book Of Friends you…”. You can also go with other names that are really similar to your keyword. Again, for the Natsume Book of Friends you can write Natsume Yuujinchou. Things like that, of course don’t start spamming your keyword in all of your text it will make people think of it as awkward and forced and just get out of your blog (which is bad for the SEO, I’ll talk about it in another day).

– It’s all about Content –

Google Robot at the moment is more concerned with if your content is something that people enjoy to read than anything else, so for that you really need to have good content!

In fact that’s what the most important, right? Write things you are proud off and that your followers love to read! So, take this into account and in case of doubt go with what you think that you would prefer to write and be yourself!

How Google measures if your content is enjoyable or not is taking into account a great amount of factors. For us, WP people, we could think of it as, comments, likes, social shares… But that’s not all! If you have more clicks when people see your post on Google and stay a decent amount of time that is also counted for example.

I’ll give you the example of the only post (that I know of) that I ended up getting in first page of Google – Why, as a gay guy, I don’t like Shounen-Ai – Cutting short a hater made this post to go completely overboard. This is one of the most posts that had more discussion so it was ranking better than my other posts in Google. But then, that girl came and wrote an essay stating everything that was wrong in the post and I… As a gentleman… Answered to each point she had written. Afterwards I posted it on Twitter, just well… It was a funny thing and you guys, awesome as you are really got into it!

Only from that tweet I got 50 clicks, people spent their time inside the post reading the comments (and eating popcorn) I’m sure, the result was that Google Robot saw that post was really entertaining and increased his ranking even more. I can say that, at the moment I have daily views on that post, something that doesn’t happen to any of the other ones.

Well… I’m gonna stop it for now! There is more things to tell you and help you, but the post is already really lengthy and I know you hate to read xD So, for now I will let you with these 5 tips – if you use the pictures’ tip you will see that, with time, more google views will come for sure!

Next month when I come back I’ll do a part 2 where I talk about Google Search Console, Links and the Importance of Social Media, Commenting, tags and community in general, How Google “Likes” to read our posts, Slugs (meaning URLs) and the importance of not repeating ourselves 😛

Tell me in the comments your ideas on SEO / How to Get More Google Hits! Also, tell me if this is an idea that is interesting to you or if I should just stop it right now 😀 Last, but not the least, tell me if this helped you in any kind of away xD

You can read part 2 here!

See You Soon! 😀