How To Blog – Google’s Top Tips For Success

How To Blog - Google's Tip Tips For Success, is a brief outline of the advice Google gives to Webmasters (bloggers) to help them blog better and improve their sites. I've picked out the most important points from the horse's mouth - so to speak - and created small chunks for your quick perusal below. 

Google's best tips for blogging success

How to blog: design and content

Here are Google's top tips on the design your blog should follow, and the content you should create for it. Many of these are quite straight forward, but it's always good to remind ourselves. It's easy enough to forget. 

Create a hierarchy so each page can be found from static links (I like to group by categories like I’ve done on this blog in the link bar above (where you can see my books etc). Wordpress will do it for you easily.

Make sure you have a short description of your site (140 – 156 words) in your title page. This makes it easier for people to find and understand what your site is about. It enables search engines to also read your blog better. For example if you manage a writing site, make sure your description includes the word, 'writing'.

Avoid using dynamic text like (?) in your blog titles. Search engines can’t read them. In addition, use words to describe your images. Search engines can’t understand them without these. (Remember you and a million other people search for images each day. Don’t miss out on visitors by not optimising your images for traffic). 

When creating your blog post, make sure you’re writing great and helpful content. Write in paragraphs separated by bold or h1 or h2 texts. If you don't quite understand how to write for online viewers you need to read these tutorials.

How to blog: technical guidelines

This section tells you about the technical guidelines Google has recommended to make your blog search-engine friendly. 

Create and submit a sitemap of your site.

Make sure your privacy settings allow search engines to crawl your site. Wordpress default is set so that they can’t.

Check your site in different browsers to make sure it appears the way you want it to.

Make sure your site doesn’t take too long to load. You can use Page Speed or Webmaster tools to check and maintain this. You can use free gadgets to monetize your page views, but don't go overboard with them because they can seriously affect your site's loading time.

How to blog: quality control

Write your posts for people to read and be helped by. Don’t pack them with keywords just for search engines. You could be penalised for this.

Don’t copy content from other websites. This is classed as duplicate content and will harm your rating on Google. If you do want to use other people's content on your site, there are better, smarter ways to do this. 

Of course there are several other points in blogging the right way. I've certainly not covered all of them in this brief article. I just wanted to highlight Google's important factors in their own words (well, my words, gleaned from their words :-). I don't think anyone has all the right answers - I certainly don't. Having said that, reading on the web can uncover some great ways to make blogging easier and more successful. If you have any other questions on how to blog check out this group of articles designed for new bloggers.