I've seen it over and over again. Often little thought goes into the creation of a post. "Help me", "Something isn't right", and "MicroStation Question..." are common titles. No tags are used, and the description is too short, leaving more questions then answers.
My last blog post was part informative and part experiment. I want to see if what I put in my post mattered, and if I could get it to come up in Google search result pages (SERPs) so other people could easily find it. The goal is not only for people on this site to be able to find the post, but others outside of the sitel.
First, I thought of what people would search for if they were trying to decide on using an avatar. The simplest thought, "Choosing an avatar", was actually the first title of my post. After the post was written I realized that I wrote a little about why choosing an avatar was important in an online community, so I added ‘Important' to the title.
Second, I thought carefully about what I wanted to put in the post. Being specific helps. I got into the head of my audience. I thought to myself "what would they search for if thinking about a similar topic?" After I wrote these keywords or phrases down, I used them in the body. I also linked to sources where appropriate.
Third, I used tags! I took the simpliest keywords and put them in the tag section. This helps search engines and people find your post through linking and indexing.
After a week of writing the blog post, I checked Google to see what search terms my post came up in. Surprisingly, this is what I found:
External traffic is coming from Google into my blog post. If this were a forum post asking a question, maybe one of those people would know the answer, sign up, and answer the question for me. For my purpose, this is simply informative.
Likewise, the internal search easily picks up my post.
Next time you start a new blog post, forum thread, or wiki topic, do the following:
PR refers to PageRank, which is something "invented" by Google. There are various descriptions of it on the Web (WikiPedia has one of the better ones).
What does "Be Communities is a PR of 6 at the moment" actually mean? What does PR stand for?
Thanks for the comments guys!
BTW, this posts is now ranking in Google. A couple examples:
#1- http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=properly+naming+posts&btnG=Search
#1 - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=properly+tagging+posts&btnG=Search
#1 - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=naming+posts+properly+for+search+engines&btnG=Search
#4 - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=naming+your+posts&btnG=Search
#8 - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=importance+of+tagging&btnG=Search
You should always try to tag your posts, blogs, wiki's etc,. The Google spiders crawl it and build a relational database in their servers on a daily basis.. Every tag pollinates related content with additional relevant results when you Google phrases and keywords, especially in a Google-search-centric place like Bentley Communities..
Thanks for this Jdeg. Tags were always a mystery for me.