a little search engine optimization never hurt anyone
Posted on 04/07/2009
After continually receiving lame page-rankings on my previous blog attempt, I thought this time that I might spend a little more time to get a bit of my content into Google search results. I've never really messed with SEO before, so this is a bit of a first for me.
Off the bat, I only really knew (thought I knew) of two ways to help increase page rank:
- meta keywords
- meta descriptions
Turns out I was wrong. These days, the keywords don't really help all that much, and the description -- that's just used to display a little snippet of your content in the search results. Despite their near-uselessness, I still implemented them anyway. ;)
What my Googling did recommend was this:
- descriptive page titles
- canonical url tags
- submitting a site map
So I updated the post view to display the post title in the page title -- nothing too ground-breaking there. I'm still up in the air about the canonical url tags since I know there's only one possible url to reach any of the content on this site, although I still may implement that later.
For the site map, I took a look at Google's Webmaster Tools which informed me that I could submit an RSS link ass my site map. This led me to implement an RSS feed, which I hadn't yet done. Within an hour of submitting the link, Google had index the whopping two posts that I had created. Now I just need to migrate the content from my previous blog.
So hopefully all of that will be enough to get me a few more page views from people that aren't my friends or coworkers.