Having trouble finding your article on Google, Yahoo etc?
It can be difficult for articles you write to show up in search engines, just because the competition is huge. Unless you search for your exact headline you may not show up, especially if you didn’t add any keywords or tags for SEO (that’s Search Engine Optimisation – rather a dark art of getting your content found).
For example, I frequently write about WordPress. Yet searching for WordPress is not going to bring any of my articles up on the front page. Maybe further down, say page 47 or so. The reason for this is that millions of people are writing about the same subject, and many of them have paid to appear at the top of serach engines for this keyword.
My latest post is called “What exactly is a blog” – even typing that into Google doesn’t bring my article up on the front page, because hundreds of other people have written an article by the same title. However, search for “what exactly is a blog versluis” (i.e. include my last name) and I’m at the very top of Google.
Some points to remember to make your content found:
- use keywords that are relevant to your article – add them as tags or use your Themes SEO options for this. If your theme does not support this natively, add your keywords as WordPress Post Tags
- use between 5-8 keywords per article you write. Don’t use more as this will dilute their quality
- make sure your website is public (under Settings – Privacy), otherwise search engines won’t come to visit and see your content
If your website is new, or if you’re recently made a significant change to your content, search engines may not notice this for a while. To help them along visit a service like pingomatic.com – it will submit your article to a great many search engines at ones and for free. WordPress does this automatically whenever you write a new article.