Hey, everyone.
I thought it might be nice if I actually explained some of the stuff I’ve learned for my fellow amateurs from an amateur’s point of view since I know I DO get a few people reading this. Mostly, I’ll just be regurgitating stuff I’ve read on other sites in my own words.
What I’m basically talking about is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Once you start a blog or a website, you need to submit it to the big search engines; mostly just Google and Yahoo!. SEO is ways of getting higher rankings on those search engines so people who use them can find you and you can get more traffic; that is, people visiting your site.
First, there’s Tags. You’ve probably seen tags before. They’re those words associated with an article or video; little classifications that help you look stuff up and help search engines decide what kind of site you have if you’re starting one. For example, if you go to youtube and type in “kittens”, you’ll get videos with the “kittens” tag on them. Tags are the key words people type into a search engine to find what they’re looking for. That’s a good way to choose tags, by the way; just think of what you’d type into a search engine to help you find the kind of content you wanna put on your site. Apparently, you’re suppose to use at least one or two of these key words in the title of whatever it is you’re putting up, be it an article or video or what-have-you, and use them in the body of your articles or descriptions of your videos, too. Whatever site you’re putting your content on will probably specifically ask you what kid of tags you wanna put on it. When I finish this article, for example, I have to choose the tags for it before I publish it.
Off the top of my head, I don’t really remember what meta-tags are. They’re similar to normal tags, of course, but serve a different function. Actually, I may have just described meta-tags instead of regular tags, or possibly both for all I know. Anyway, a good Google search will tell you what I can’t.
Another good way of getting better rankings on the search engines is to have a lot of back-links. This is when other people post a link to your site on theirs. Apparently these are pretty important. The more you have, the more popular you must be. One way to get those, as I mentioned in my last post, is to comment on other people’s articles on sites that ask if you have a blog or website of your own when you comment on theirs. Make sure you post something meaningful, though. Don’t just go there and write “Cool article”. Don’t be a jack-ass. There’s gotta be other ways of getting back-links, though. Going to other people’s sites and commenting on them for every single back-link seems very inefficient and time-consuming.
Another thing is site-pinging. You get your site “pinged” by a search engine or a pinging service. I’m not entirely sure what this is or how important it is, though, at this point.
I’ve also started making youtube videos of at least some of my blogs. Just today, I figured out how I can upload videos made on my new iPod Touch. I tried doing that before, but I had problems with the sound track being off so it looked like I was in a badly dubbed movie. I figure posting video blogs is just another good way to get myself out there. I try to point people to this blog in the description of my videos.
Anyway, again, that’s where I’m at. That’s what I know right now. I’ve got a lot to learn. My blog traffic is improving, but it’s not quite at the level it should be before I try to make any money off of it. I’m still coming up with ideas for what kind of sites I wanna have, but first things first; gotta learn how to get people’s attention.
Wish me luck.
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