How to get high on Google
Over at my arts blog, search engine optimisation unexpectedly made an appearance this week.
I had written a piece about the palaver surrounding Patrick Jones' poetry reading, but its headline seemingly lent itself to Google's search machine priorities and within hours it was amongst the top five results for people searching combinations of "Welsh", "poet" and "Christian Voice".
Of course, there's far more to achieving a first-page result on Google than the make-up of your headline. Ensuring your journalism is part of a network means people will read you, link to you, and come back to you. Only by interacting with other journalists in your network can you achieve consistently high Google rankings, and generate a steady stream of traffic.
But why should readers come back at all? Far from saturating your blog with keywords and spamming the comment threads of others by depositing a link along with a banal sentence, networked journalism requires you to earn your readers' respect.
The best bloggers provide regular, articulate comment that encourages a loyal readership regardless of whether everything they say is necessarily accurate or informative. In politics, Iain Dale states he's had over half a million unique visitors to his blog in the last year, and lists the top sites which generate the most traffic. He is easily trumping half the magazines on the news-stand with results like that.
And readership numbers on the internet are far easier to calculate than in the conventional press. The ABCs don't take into account the fact that a reader doesn't consume every article on every page. But a service like Google Analytics gives an absolute breakdown, so a blog-owner can immediately assess which articles work and which ones don't.
This is great for small-scale bloggers, but priceless information for corporations tip-toeing carefully into the blogosphere. When cash is your main motivation, getting accurate data about who is consuming your product means you can deliver what they want and keep them coming back for more. This is particularly relevant in niche markets, and allows blogs to develop quickly into reliable sources of informed comment on a particular subject.
The sad truth is that without a wider network, a few choice keywords in your headline don't do enough to draw in new readers or keep old ones coming back. The proof? My post on the Welsh poet has now vanished into the Google ether, without a network to support its veracity or reliability.
This post is a response to the Online & Mobile Media lecture on Wednesday, November 12, 2008.
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