Is your blog missing from the Google Index
If you have a Word Press blog, which is the platform for this particular blog, you may be excluding your blog from the Google Index without even realizing it. Two of my clients were being excluded and I was left puzzled and questioning what I KNEW to be true. Goes to show that you learn something new every day…and today I learned something new about Word Press.
One of my clients has a Word Press blog, which he built himself using the free guide "blogging for buyers". He hired me to help him find a domain name and I felt really good about the domain we chose. Based on all the research I did, it seemed as though the domain name alone would help him to yield good search results once he added some good content to the site. Not So Much! (learn more about how to chose a good domain name here.)
No matter what we did and how I coached him, we couldn’t get Google to index his blog. We have all of the SEO tools installed, had hand submitted the site to the Google Index and NOTHING! I hope this will all change with what I discovered today. I wanted to bring it to your attention as well to make sure you have your Word Press blog set up properly to be indexed and crawled by Google, Technorati, etc.
Follow these steps to make sure you are in good shape: On the left side of your Word Press screen, you will see "settings", click on it. A list of options will drop down, and one of those options is "privacy", click on it.
Make sure that your site is set TO BE CRAWLED, and not set to block the search engines. I am 100% sure that both of my clients who had their settings set to "block the search engines" did not choose that setting, which leads me to believe that it is the default setting. I can’t think of any other way that it would have ended up "blocking" the search engines and I am very hopeful that now that it is fixed, Google will begin to crawl the site and we will see some activity.
One bloggers big blogging MISTAKE
Don’t hide content from your visitors.
I love visiting the sites of other bloggers who really offer great content and sometimes what I read, really sticks with me in a way that I want to return again and again to re-read it. I may mention it to other people in conversation, retweet it, or simply want to refer back to it because it was a great lesson!
One of my favorite bloggers, who shall remain nameless, because he really is a GREAT blogger who offers great content. I visit his blog daily to see what other little tid bits of information he has for me today in the world of blogging. His tid bits are "gold nuggets" and I so appreciate them. I recently read a post on his blog about the importance of your headline. He mentioned in his post that the heading of your post is as important than the blog itself. So important that you should invest as much time in the heading as in the blog post itself.
He also offered GREAT tips on what a good heading includes, buzz words that are important, etc. I was having a conversation with a friend regarding some issues she was having getting people to open her email blasts and I thought about this post! This post included just what she needed to improve her open rate! I have since then, visited this blog no less than 6 times to try and find this "golden post", but can’t find it because he has no "search box" on his blog that I can find. He offers related articles, which I was fortunate to read while "hunting" for the one article I really wanted, but after six visits…still can’t find that one post! Gosh Darnit!
Lesson Learned – MAKE SURE YOUR BLOG HAS A SEARCH on it, so people who return and want to find a past article CAN find it. It is the simple things that we often forget.
Make sure to upgrade your Word Press
It is that time again. Word Press has come out with a new upgrade. You can upgrade your Word Press automatically by clicking at the top of your screen when you first log in to your blog.
It is important to make sure you keep up to date on your upgrades to keep your blog from getting hacked. Many times, these upgrades are done to not only add more functions and features to your blog, but to update potential security issues that have surfaced. Always make sure to keep your word press blog updated and current as a first defense to keep from getting hacked.