Google is the greatest Librarian in the world. It can help you find the information you need from any of its resources at the click of a button. How is this librarian so effective and what are its secrets? With so much information to choose from, how I can I make sure it picks mine to share with the world?
There are 3 ways it delivers it’s answers to the searchers. In the article, “How Google Search Works” by Google it says.
“Crawling: Does Google know about your site? Can we find it? Indexing: Can Google index your site? Serving: Does the site have good and useful content that is relevant to the users search? See full article for more details.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/
So you now know the librarians secrets, how do you make sure it picks you? I picked 5 ways out of the suggestions given from various articles on-line.
I will improve the content of my site. I need to add relevance and uniqueness to my blog. I need to make it so people want to share what I have made, providing useful tips and information. The more my page is shared or linked to other sites, the more the Librarian is watching me.
I will Pin, Facebook, Tweet and Instagram my work. One of my colleagues in my class suggested a workflow from after the photo shoot. It involved blogging and sharing on all social media so that again, I am more visible to the librarian. I also need to make sure in my website, the work is pinnable by those who visit it.
I will add links to credible sites from my website. Knowing that I am not the expert in all things, I will link to great articles and ideas. I will make sure these links open in a new window, so that those who were on my site can stay with me.
I will change the headings to match the keywords that are used to search for my site. I will also change the URLS so that they have keyword embedded in them so the Librarian can find them easily.
I will make sure that my site is crawler/bot accessible. If my page is down I will use a status code 503 or use 301 for a permanent redirect. If I have gone to all of the trouble to make my site found, I need to allow the crawlers who are searching in to find me. Geoff Kenyon’s wrote a great article “Technical Audit Checklist” which explains how to make this happen. http://moz.com/blog/how-to-do-a-site-audit
Making sure you are on top of your search engine success is an ongoing process and using Google Analytics as a tool, you can see where you are succeeding or failing in your attempts.
Simply Sarah-Jayne 