My Blog is here:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?p=543485#543485
In it I give my employer a ration of stuff. In fact, it is remarkable they have not fired me. What can I do to make my site more visible to Google and other search engines? Remember to speak slowly as these computers are confusing to us old folks.
Posting it to message boards can help. One of the criteria Google uses in its Pagerank system is the number of links to a particular page there are, on the basis that this is likely to be a more useful page than one with fewer links.
The SDMB is not scanned by Google though.
OK first here is Googles official statement on how they rank pages. Browse All of Google's Products & Services - Google
Warning it may not be tecno-bable but it is a bit confusing.
From a practical approach here is my advise based on a daily effort to raise my various websites Google ratings.
2-a. Decide what keywords you would want your blog to come up for and create meta tags for them. Basically figure out what you would put into Google if you wanted to find blogs similar to your own. Do a Google search on “meta tag generator” there are a lot of sites that have a simple form to fill out and the meta tags will be written for you. Most have instructions on where and how to add the results (code) to your blog page. However some blog sites will not allow you to add meta tags so this may not be an option to you.
2-b. Once you have decided what key words you want to use make sure they are in the text of your page as often as possible. Lets say you wanted to have your blog come up in google when someone searched on “Joe’s Widgets”. (A fictitious employer I hope) Read your text. You might find that would normally write something like:
“Joe’s Widgets is a really bad company. They do really bad things like the time they forgot to pay me.”
Rewriting that for a search engine would have to go something like:
“Joe’s Widgets is a really bad company. Joe’s Widgets do really bad things like the time Joe’s Widgets forgot to pay me.”
I know it makes for awkward reading but Google does not understand the content of your text only the number of times the key word or phrase comes up in a given block of text.
There are many other things you may do as well but those are two easy ones that can really assist in bringing up your ratings on Google.
BTW I dedicate at least 4 to 5 hours a week just to improving my ranking on Google with my professional sites. Its not easy especially if your trying to keyword something very common. Good luck.
Thank you both.