(Unintentional) SEO SUCCESS!
Today’s Google Doodle is THE BEST.
Happy 142nd birthday, Maria Montessori, you lovely genius! I love that today’s Google Doodle featured several Montessori learning materials — both Google founders went to Montessori schools and have said that Google would never have been created if they hadn’t. I can honestly say that I would not be the same person if I hadn’t gone to a Montessori school from the ages of three to nine.
The “g” is a sandpaper letter, which is how I learned to read; the “l” shows golden beads, which were how I learned my times tables; and the “e” is a trinomial cube, which helped me understand math.
My Top 10 Favorite Search Queries
Google Webmaster Tools tells me the most popular search queries that my blog shows up for. These are my 10 favorites:
- Hipster clothes - 3,500 impressions
- Zach Galifianakis - 3,000 impressions
- Obese animals - 900 impressions
- Train conductor - 900 impressions
- Popples - 250 impressions
- Crazy unicorn - 200 impressions
- Keira Knightley boobs - 170 impressions
- Raccoon penis - 150 impressions
- Pantyhose for men - 90 impressions
- Used tampon - 70 impressions
Not sure what kind of freaks are Googling the last three things on the list, or why…
New robot friend hangin’ with Hello Kitty on my desk.
(Taken with instagram)
FWD Thinking: I Made Friends with SEO Last Night
Last night, Alicia and I attended a Skillshare class called “SEO Is Your Friend: Intro to Link Juice and Ranking High on Google,” at the offices of Producteev, a cool new task management app. Here are a few of the tips I found most interesting, which will help with search engine optimization (SEO) for this here blog or any website:
- Include the keywords you want your site associated with in your website title, metatag description (limit it to 70 characters; Google only shows that much in the preview) and headers.
- Only bold important/relevant terms on your site — Googlebots place more importance on bolded terms, so bolding random words will confuse them.
- Make sure you have relevant keywords in your anchor text (those are the words you hyperlink) and avoid writing generic things like “click here.”
- Optimize your image filenames and webpage URLs with relevant keywords, separated by dashes (other symbols confuse the Googlebots…they get confused easily). For example, it would be better to name this image “OMG-walrus.jpg” before uploading it to your site, instead of something generic like “untitled.jpg.”
However, using these tips to optimize your own site can only take you so far — what will really help you is getting inbound links from a wide variety of other websites, something that you can’t exactly control, unless you own a wide variety of influential websites. The good news is that PR can help you with that! Securing media coverage and guest posting opportunities on other blogs and websites that link back to you will increase your own site’s Google juice.
It’s also worth taking a look at where your clients rank on Google when you search for the keywords they’d like to be associated with. It took them over a year, but the aforementioned Producteev finally made it to numero uno for its term of choice, “task management,” partly by pitching online journalists and bloggers and guest-blogging on other sites. So, follow these tips and soon, maybe you too can be sippin’ on gin and Google juice.
—Alyssa
Nice username, Google Map Maker.
