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

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

Hello everyone and welcome to our place!

Finally we get to the third (and last) class about Search Engine Optimization – Getting More Google Hits – If it’s the first post you got here, here’s the links to the other parts:

So, today I bring you somethings that maybe are not as intuitive than the others πŸ™‚ However, they still make a part about Google and you should take into account these!

Getting More Google Hits Third Class
Don’t worry, this is the last one!

– Title | Slug | Excerpt –

Did you know that you can have a slug (hyperlink) different from your title? Well, you can! Just go to more options and it’s the first field!

Why am I saying this? Because sometimes it is important to change it! As you may already think, the first things that Google look when someone searches something is the title and the hyperlink, so you want them to be Google friendly! However, the title has another job of utmost importance, be catchy enough for people to click on it!

Getting More Google Hits! - Third Class Post Titles
You know… Catchy!

So, this way you can just go wild with the title and then change the slug for *Insert Anime name* review. Other thing that is important is for you to have a good hyperlink where you put some words that can be used to call the same content you are writing. For example, let’s say the Anime you are talking about has a japanese and an english name, you can just put both of them!

The excerpt is other thing that you can change. This option is below the slug one. Now, the excerpt is really important, not only to get more Google Hits, but for Social Media (and for your own blog if you use the display posts short code with excerpts like me :P).

You know that small description below the title when you look for something in Google? Wouldn’t be amazing if you could write what appears instead of only appearing parts of your content and end with …? Well, you can, by changing your excerpt! What you write there it will be what appears in Google!

Getting More Google Hits! - Third Class meta description
I looked for “amazed anime gif” and this appeared…

But, wait! There’s more! You know the small description that appears below the image when you share your post in Social Media? Guess, what? That description will also be the excerpt you wrote! Basically, if you are a perfectionist like me and like to have total control, you just need to write your own excerpts!

Moreover, you can put excerpts that will help to increase the people who clicks on it! Think of it as a help to your catchy title! However, take into account that in Google it’s not always automatic. While in Social Media it will appear right away, sometimes I see GoogleΒ using my excerpts to the meta description until some days later.

– Formatting –

What? Your text format also matters? Yeap!

Think a little about it… What we, humans, do to catch other humans’ attention? We write in higher fonts, we put bold, we change color. Things like that… And, you know what? Google knows about that and it will take it into account!

Getting More Google Hits! - Third Class post formatting

Basically, Google will look first to your headings (starting from the biggest) and then will crawl down going first to everything we normally do to get attention from others. Basically, Google will think that those are main points and what is more important in your post. With that information you can change things just a little bit so your main keywords appear in the most important part!

To be honest, I don’t really do that in this blog. But, for example, in the portuguese Anime website where I write once a week all those rules are followed! Contrary to what you may think, it really doesn’t take that much of your creativity.

One example. Let’s say you are doing a review and you are going to talk about the story. Instead of a heading only saying “Story” you can write “*Anime name here* Story”. See, it didn’t destroy your creativity, for the reader is not that spammy and you just improved your SEO a little bit! πŸ˜€

Getting More Google Hits! - Third Class post rules for seo
I just said the contrary… But… Ok…

But, in the end, I think these are some of the things that you will win more if you do the format you prefer. Yeah, we want to be Google friendly, but we also don’t want to lose our identity as a blogger! That’s what makes people to follow you and if everyone wrote things in the same way with the same visuals no one would really be able to grow πŸ™‚

– Speed Time –

Getting More Google Hits! - Third Class blog speed

Other thing that Google takes into account that maybe you are not aware of… The Time it gets to upload your link. You can test your website right now in Google! Just click here!

Now, if you are using your home’s Internet maybe that does not really matter, but think if your website is getting accessed by a mobile using data. There things make the difference, right?

Now, from my experience, WordPress already does this for you! Meaning, you don’t really need to think about making your blog mobile friendly, or responsible to mobile for that matter. However, there is something that you need to give a little importance, which media size!

If you are like me, you just love to use all type of Gifs and images, but there is a small problem with that! Let’s say that you have an awesome Gif, but when you hit that properties button you see that is 5Mbs… Well, at this point I just don’t use it. Why? Because it is way too heavy! Each one of your pictures/Gifs shouldn’t weight more than 1MB, this because the server will take a little more time to upload. Think of it as when you open a website where everything appears, but the pictures seem to arrive a little later.

Getting More Google Hits! - Third Class image size
Our images while running to get in time for the post!

There are some ways for you decrease the weight of the pictures and if you want, I’ll be more than happy to help you out with it! In fact it really is not that hard, but I can do an easy step-by-step for you! For Gifs… Well, normally the way for you to have than lighter is to have them smaller (I always go for the 500px width) and without a lot of seconds in the clip that will play on loop πŸ™‚

Almost forgetting, other thing that works is: Instead of uploading your pictures to your Blog Server use an external server and then use HTML to get the image. But, for this one I would need another post to explain everything step-by-step, tell me if you would like that in the comments πŸ˜€

Getting More Google Hits Third Class using third party servers
Here’s a random Gif that is not uploaded to my media library πŸ˜€

– Conclusion –

And that concludes my classes over this subject! I hope you liked it and you have learnt something from these! In the end, you can just think that the things which make your site more google friendly are just the things that will also increase your views in its own way. For example, the links – yes it helps the Google, but if you have links there’s a probability that you will have some clicks and therefore some more views, right?

Also, take into account that this takes time, like a lot of it! That’s why marketers always say the best way for you to create traffic in the beginning is by using social media. Nevertheless, it’s better to start optimizing your site for Google right now than when you already have a ton of content.

For my next class series I will be talking about the basics of Design in WordPress, basically show what I’ve learnt while in my one month hiatus improving the design here at my place πŸ™‚ Tell me in the comments if you would be excited for that! πŸ˜€

Arthis from the Future here: Hello people from the past! How are you? It seems that I ended up forgetting to talk about something really important… Tags and Categories! Come read the part 4 (and last one I hope) of this series!

Getting More Google Hits Third Class conclusion

See You Soon! πŸ˜€

0 thoughts on “Arthifis’ Classroom: Getting More Google Hits! – Third Class

  1. I’ve read all three of these so far and they are amazing, and so very helpful! I learned about a bunch of things I wasn’t aware of, such as slugs. Never really knew what they were, but now that I do, I can use them! Thank you so much.

      1. You’re welcome!! I’m excited to try out the new stuff that I learned. πŸ˜€ I’m always on the look-out for advice on ways to improve my blog as well as myself as a content creator, so I’m very grateful for people like you who take the time to share tips and things. It means a lot to me.

  2. Thank you for the really informative posts. I’ll be sure to try to incorporate all these sweet techniques to my blog posts from now on (and also try to re-SEO my previous blog posts, but that’s probably gonna take some time :P).

    1. Thank you for the comment! Makes me really happy that you found it helpful xP

      Yeah don’t stress too much about it at the moment eheh just go and start applying them to the new posts xP to be honest my older posts are not really done for seo either ahah

    1. Ahah it also happened to me in the beginning! But after changing All of the older posts excerpts (for the blog design) I don’t forget it anymore! It was way too pain in the butt to go and do it again xD

  3. Man, I sure am glad you offered this crash course; there were several things you brought up to achieve search engine optimization that I’m really not doing, I do have a question, though, sensei.

    I typically just title my reviews with the name of the series. Is it worthwhile to add “review” to the hyper link if I also already have it tagged “anime review”, or would doing that be negligible/counterproductive?

    1. Thank you so much! πŸ˜€ I’m really glad that it helped you! πŸ˜€

      That’s a great question and in this case it’s better to add in both. I understand what are you trying to say because Google penalizes duplicated things. However, in here we are talking about two different things. One thing is the hyperlink which should be easiy readable to the persn (Google bot likes that) and then you are talking about tags which have two different objectives -> making easier to your readers to easily access all posts under that tag and make your post show up in the WordPress reader if someone types your tag.

      I completely forgot to talk about tags and categories >.< I will do it so this friday since it's something important to talk about πŸ˜€

    1. Oh I can number a great amount of things I can’t do: Drawing, singing, programming, build a time machine, painting, read and comment all posts in WordPress! Oh there’s a zilion of things I can’t do! XD But thank you for the comment it made me smile and feel warm inside xD

      1. Haha…never say never…who knows. When Irina invents that time machine, she will teach you how to build one, and you can work on all those things you can’t do at the moment ??

          1. Ooooh don’t worry! Irina is way too Canadian to start a tantrum… I hope (?) I love how we are having a cross conversation between two posts thoughs ahah

  4. seo’s not really my thing, but i spend a lot of time on optimizing page loads. i personally like to use pingdom tools rather than page speed insights because it breaks down the DOM objects and shows a waterfall of how they’re loaded. that tends to be useful for picking out what’s slowing down the page load. i tend to be more strict when it comes to images, so i wont use any that are larger than 300kb. one thing that helps is creating a copy of the image at a smaller size and linking to the full size image. there are html tags that can reduce the size of an image, but those dont actually compress the image.

    1. Those are great tips! The only thing I do is making pictures lighter with photoshop! I’m trying to also try doing the “using another sever” kind of thing. I’m using Imgur at the moment, but I’ll try your idea cause it seems way better! πŸ˜€ Thank you for your tips! I love to learn new things to improve my blog eheh

      1. i would suggest looking into a cdn over using imgur to host your images. you might not run into trouble, but imgur’s ToS specifically points out that you shouldnt use the site to host image libraries. cdns are probably more optimized for this particular purpose as well.

    1. Yes, in fact it doesn’t use any space at all. The picture is placed in another place and the HTML is just getting the pic from that source! πŸ™‚

      I’ll be doing a post about that next week, explaining all steps and where you can store your images πŸ™‚

  5. Cool stuff, I think I read your first and second classes too, quite interesting. It’s too bad that I’m not doing any guest blogging since I’m awful at maintaining quality, sometimes I’m like, ‘meh whatever, clicks publish and runs away’. I could really get some help with links to my blog though!

    1. Oh thank you so much!! It makes me happy to read that eheh

      Well, to be honest I also don’t do much guest blogging! Only now I’m starting doing collabs. The same reason as yours, I also just click publish and run! I don’t really do much background check and only write from the top of my head ahah

      Well, awards is a nice way to have links and of course social media! πŸ˜€

  6. Good post :D. I tried doing a post like this back in 2015. Needless to say, not many were interested. So I didn’t continue with it. Have to admit though, this is way more interesting and more appealing than mines XDD.

    Just to point something out Art – when it comes to titles, it’s okay to have a catchy title, but don’t mislead or use “click bait” titles. Respect your readers, tell them what to expect. For instances I always use a catchy title, the title used is a contained self referencing, followed by the anime name and what it is – a first impression or a review. That way they don’t get this grand expectation or going in blind, not knowing as to what your blog post is actually about. They should know what they are getting.

    With excerpts, I’m kind of lazy with. Sometimes I use them, at times I don’t XDD. Not surprising many don’t use it. In the words of judge “I prefer snails over slugs” xDD. And he actually said that. But yeah change the slug to make it more friendly. Blogger only allows you to change it once, WP you can change it many times. Well the last time I went on blogger, it allowed me to change it once. I use imgur and flickr for my images. A bit weary now that smug mug has acquired flickr. As for formatting, well you’ve seen my post(s) XDD.

    1. loool thank you so much~! And don’t say that! I’m sure that yours were also great eheh

      Oh yes, completely agree with you! Moreover because it’s important to have those keywords in the title! But, well… I just though that everyone knew that? I mean, what is the point of misleading your readers? xD They will just click away, right?

      Ahahah well, I was too… But after having to write to all my 200 posts because of the design changes I did, I promised myself I wouldn’t pass it anymore xD

      Never used Blogger… Is it cool? I mean, I’m already so into WordPress that I don’t think I will try it out, but it’s always nice to know more about other platforms eheh

      loool your design is not that bad! I really like the colouring! I’m never able to make orange work as you do xD However, I do insert way more images πŸ˜€ I’m always afraid that people get sick of my writing without “cleaning” their eyes from time to time ahah

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