There was an interesting discussion yesterday in Shoemoney’s blog about learning money-making secrets from the “gurus” where he nicely plugged my first AdSense book. (Wish he’d plugged the second, though, because I make 40 times more per copy with that one!) The discussion revolved around whether ebook writers were actually selling their “secrets”: if they were, why were they so stupid to do so, and if they weren’t then they’re just fraudsters. Read the post and the comments, they all make good reading.
Today I’m going to talk about something more mundane, which is getting your blog listed in Google. One of my readers runs a ferry travel site that specializes in ferries operating in the Washington, British Columbia and Alaska regions. The site is actually the online extension of an offline business, one that seems very useful to me. They’ve got a great keyword-based domain name, they’ve got decent PageRank (3 or 4) on the important pages. They seem to be doing everything right. So what’s wrong?
One of the unique features of the site is the ferry news section, which features newsworthy and usually time-sensitive ferry travel information. But you can’t find that information in Google. So what should they do?
When you have news you’d like to get into Google, the best thing you can do is get listed in Google News. But you have to be a news organization for this to happen. So what’s the second best thing to do? Getting your feed into Google.
A feed is a resource list stored in a special format. Most feeds are associated with blogs nowadays, but that’s not how they started. Feeds can list pretty much anything. If you have news, you can build a feed out of it.
Luckily, the ferry news site already has a ferry travel news feed up and running. That’s the hard part. All they have to do now is get it into Google.
Here’s what you do: create a personalized Google homepage. Click the “Add Stuff” link on the right side of the page, then click “Add RSS feed” on the left side of the resulting page. Enter the feed address. Your feed will now show up on your personalized home page. Google will eventually start indexing it, which is what you want. It usually happens pretty quickly, too.
In Getting Your News Into Google I showed the basic steps involved in getting your news (via an RSS feed) into the Google search engine. I forgot to mention another way to do it, however, and that’s to use Google’s blogsearch ping feature. It’s something they added a few months ago — until that point they relied on pings from third-party ping aggregators. Now you can ping Google directly whenever you have new content. This information is buried here, though, so I’m not sure how many people know about it.
It’s been two days since the ferry travel site I mentioned submitted its feed to Google, so what are the results? As you can see from this query, Google’s blog search now incorporates results from the FerryTravel.com feed, which is exactly what my reader wanted to happen.
Now that the site’s listed, though, there’s some more work to be done. The titles of all the pages need to be reworked. Ideally each page should have a unique and descriptive title that includes relevant keywords. Don’t just repeat the site title over and over. Here’s some reading about the proper use of titles for SEO:
AdSense publishers, take note: the title is also used by the ad selection algorithms (along with the page URL, headings, etc.). So it’s not just for SEO purposes that you want to do this.
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