We’ve been getting a few questions about how to best optimize your Factoidz to be picked up in search engines, so I wanted to write a quick Factoid to provide some advice.
Factoid title
Titles are incredibly important for SEO. The search engines place a high priority on the words included in your title, but perhaps more importantly, the title you select is what actually shows up in the search results pages when people search for your content.
When thinking about your title, the most important tip is to think about what other people will likely search for when they are seeking the information you’re providing. It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to think of a clever and catchy title, like “Adventures and tips from a life long dog trainer.” While this may accurately describe the topic of your article, it’s unlikely that anyone would search for that phrase. Instead, think about questions that people have, like “How do I train my dog not to bark at strangers?” or “What’s the fastest way to housetrain a new puppy?” People often use search engines to solve specific problems, so you can maximize your results by creating titles that suggest solutions to those problems.
Inlinks
Surprisingly, the next most important piece of the SEO equation does not even happen on Factoidz. It happens across the Web, when other sites points to your Factoid. The most fundamental way that search engines determine the “rank” of your page is based on how many other pages link to your page. So if a blogger picks up your Factoid and creates a link to it, that will boost your ranking significantly. This effect is even greater if that blogger herself has a lot of traffic, this effect is known as weighting - the more important the site that points to your content is, the more it will boost your ranking. So the best way to boost traffic to your Factoid is to get people to link to it.
What people often don’t realize is that simply having a link is only part of the story. Search engines also analyze the text that is used to point to your article. This is known as “anchor text.” So if a blogger sees your Factoid titled Basic dining etiquette, and points to it with the link that says your guide to table manners, this is good because it gives your ranking for keywords like “table manners” in addition to the keywords in your title. In fact, if many sites link to your Factoid with the word “table manners” you will actually show up in search results for those words, even if they don’t show up in your title. Also, keep in mind that it is perfectly acceptable to include links in your Factoid to other Factoidz. While these don’t count as much as external links, they do help too. Plus they help your readers discover more of your writing.
Some good ways to develop inlinks:
- Link to your posts from your own blog or website
- Place a Factoidz badge on your website. This badge will always point to your most recent Factoidz, and will also help your readers discover your Factoidz.
- Submit your Factoidz to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Yahoo! Buzz, or Mixx. There are buttons on every Factoid to make submitting them easy, and everytime you have a new Factoid published, your notification email includes pre-formatted links to submit them to these sites.
- Email your Factoid out to friends and family, and ask them to link to it if they have a blog.
Body of your content
Search engines also look at the body of your content to make sure that the content is a) not duplicated somewhere else on the Web and b) consistent in meaning with the title of your article. So as long as your article is focused on the topic at hand, it will be laden with keywords that reinforce the meaning that you’ve setup in your title.
Tags
Tags are also important because they show up in what’s called the “meta data” of your Factoid. Search engines look at every page’s meta data (the code up at the top if you view the page’s source code) to get a sense of what it’s about. So by including all the important keywords that relate to your article, it helps the search engines understand the topic of your page. It’s most effective to use keywords that are unique in your article. For example, if you are writing about herbal remedies to cure sore throats, and one remedy is an herb called Calendula, this is a unique word that will get picked up by search engines and other sites since it is rare, and thus you should include it as a tag.
Also there are sites like Technorati which analyze tags on pages and surface them to their users. Here’s an example of a Factoid that got picked up recently by Technorati.
So hope these tips help you think through crafting your titles and articles. But really, the #1 key to great SEO, as astutely pointed out by kdelik, is to write great content. Great content will attract links and traffic with minimal effort on your part. These other tips simply grease the wheels to make sure you’re making your content as accessible as possible to search engines and potential readers.
