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Importance of Properly Naming, Tagging, and Writing Your Posts

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.

The Goal

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.

The Solution

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.  

What happened?

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. 

Why this worked

  • The keywords in the title, URL, and body text matched what was searched for
  • There generally aren't a lot of articles on the internet about picking avatars (or for that matter, fixing MicroStation) - compared to other topics like "choosing a cell phone"
  • Tags were used - this means that the article was linked to more places internally - not only does this help search engines, it helps people find your article with more ease.
  • Be Communities is a PageRank (or PR) of 6 at the moment - This means Google likes us and holds content on this site with higher precedence over some other sites. 
  • Be Communities is optimized for search engines (SEO).  Careful consideration has been made on placement of elements on the site. 

What you can do

Next time you start a new blog post, forum thread, or wiki topic, do the following:

  • Think about your audience. Who will be reading your post?
  • What would people search for when looking for the topic of your post?  What keywords would lead them there?
  • Search for things related to your topic - try to figure out why they come up first - reference or cite these sites if necessary.   Reverse this idea and think of why people would want to link to you from another site.  Organic linking is gold.
  • Your title should use above keywords - be concise! - no "Help me"
  • Use keywords in the tags
  • Be specific in your description and include as many details as possible
  • If using screenshots or graphics, caption and name the file(s) accordingly - Google images likes this
  • Use the SEO and social features of Be Communities to your advantage! 
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