This is continued on from Jorge’s questions about WordPress.com – I was actually amazed that I could find his blog at the top of Google, just by searching for what was in his title bar (albeit a bit weird). This goes to show the power of using wordpress.com as your blog and having your primary keyword as the subdomain (i.e www.primarykeyword.wordpress.com) – don’t ever neglect the power of things that are free – especially something with the authority of WordPress.com!!!
Here was todays conversation:
Q: Hi Rick, I am quite worried about the website at the mo because, when I try and look for it on google, I cannot find it. Do we type in the name of the website or the tagline?
A: you can find it by googling ‘sexytulip just another’ – so now you can see that you need to change the title and tagline to something that people might look for 🙂 – just make another, they’re free
Q: Oh ok, I mean my mum’s website though, Canvass of the Mind?
A: what’s the URL?
Q: Um, ok, this is where I’m confused, the URL is what again? The .wordpress.com part of the address or the first halve before the…?
A: well it’s the whole thing (the web address) really, like google.com, but in your case it’s probably something.wordpress.com.
So what have we learned here??? Well when you are at the home page look what is in the title bar of your browser – that’s what google looks for most i.e. ‘sexytulip just another’.
The whole point about Google is it wants to deliver accurate and useful results when someone puts in a search query. We have shown here that if someone searches for ‘sexytulip just another‘ his site could be number one, even though it is less than a week old, cost nothing to make and has virtually no content! The point is that this could be a phrase that someone may look for, you certainly aren’t going to find it easy to rank for ‘art history‘ with a WordPress blog, but you would stand a pretty good chance of ranking for something like ‘art history lectures in cambridge‘ with fairly minimal effort.
I’ll do some advice about basic SEO over the weekend, but for now, realise that Google will look at your Title Tag, then maybe the page URL and then look at your content to see if it is relevant (and original) and then work out where to place you amongst all the other people who are trying to do the same thing. This is the Google Algorithm, which is secret and changes all the time, which keeps us Internet Marketers on our toes. Over time you will see that for anything more obvious than an obscure keyphrase – you are going to need lots of incoming links to push your site up past your competitors.
It is worth noting that Google is not stupid! Far far far from that, so:
- if you write about The Whitehouse and Shades of paint and ladders it will know the site is to do with decorating, if other sites to do with decorating link to you it will rank you higher.
- If you write about the Whitehouse but talk about 911, New York, 2001 and US Military debt, it may assume you are a conspiracy theorist and links from other sites about decorating will not help your ranking. However links from sites that are concerned with The Bilderberg Group, The Illuminati and The New World Order, could very well boost your site up because of their relevancy.
I hope I didn’t confuse everyone here too much, Jorge’s idea of Canvas of The Mind, will need some work. And, this is where it all falls to bits – The IM Marketer v. The Artist – I know that Jorge’s mum will get more business if her blog is called arthistorylecturesincambridge.wordpress.com than canvasofthemind.wordpress.com – but is it art?
I’m a capitalist (who needs to look after his family – right?) and I’m in the IM game to make as much money as fast as possible with minimum effort, I know where my priorities lie 🙂