Does Your Blog Have the Answer to Someone’s Question?

As a writer, you want to learn ways to bring more people to your blog.

Most people find blogs by asking questions in search engines. Readers could use one of 30 major search engines to ask their questions online. We’ll refer to Google in this post because 90% of all searches happen on Google.com.

How Do Search Engines Work?

To gather more for its huge database of information, Google sends out crawlers. Googlebot follows links from page to page, looking for new content to add to the Google index.

Takeaways:

• Be sure to link within your blog and outside to other sites. Find some friends who will link to your blog.
• For WordPress blogs, make sure you check “Allow search engines to index this site.” (Go to Settings / Reading / Site visibility.)

How to Help People Find YOUR Answer to Their Question

When someone asks a question, Google looks for relevant answers. Help Google rank your site high for that answer.

What Is SEO?

You may not know that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. This means you can take steps to increase traffic to your blog. With some simple habits, you’ll bring in readers who are interested in what you’re publishing.

Google looks at these three in this order:

1. URL – I recommend you match your URL to your title. This happens automatically with WordPress when you compose your title.
2. Title – A good title is very important (Check out my post on 6 Tips for Viral Blog Post Headlines.)
3. Meta description – Google grabs the first 165 characters in your post.

Takeaways:

• Think of a keyword for your post. Include that word in the title and also early in your article.  Use the keyword in headings.
• One way to find a good title for your blog post is to paste your title in a Google search. I just did that. My original query had 31 million results. I decided to re-word the title and asked again. This time I had 1.4 billion results. I used the second title because it matches a question people are asking. (Look at the “Related Searches” at the bottom of Google.com for more title ideas.)
• Your post’s first 165 characters might not reflect your post’s content. I use WordPress’ “Excerpt” feature to write a summary description of every post.

You don’t need to be an expert on all the ins and outs of SEO. Choose some of these tips and start new blogging habits to improve your blog’s ranking on Google. Add some more of these until you do all these tips routinely. You’ll bring in more readers. These “pre-screened” people are also more likely to be interested in your content.

In summary, think of what questions people might be asking and use those words in your title. This will also give you a good URL. Describe your post to clarify your post’s content.

Looking glass photo by Marten Newhall on Unsplash