StGermaine.ca » Content Development

Create tag clouds online using Wordle.net

Ryan St. Germaine — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:16:33 +0000

A little while ago I came across this great tool for making tag clouds. I find that when the tag cloud text matches the topic of your post, the visual helps entice visitors to read further.

To make your own tag clouds, head on over to Wordle.net. They make it really easy to create your own cloud by simply entering keywords into their text box and then clicking go. You can also provide Wordle with a website url and they will create a tag cloud based on the keywords from that page.

Once you create your tag cloud, you’ll need a way to capture the screen so you can save the image as a jpeg or gif. Wordle does offer an embed code you can use, but I prefer to have the image hosted on my own site. I use a program called called Snagit by TechSmith. Or, if you want something that’s free that will do the trick, try Snapashot.

Use descriptive keywords in titles

Ryan St. Germaine — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:42:00 +0000

Optimize your titles for Google Search by using descriptive keywords or phrases that clearly describe your blog post. To further optimize, use the same keywords from your title in the URL and throughout your post to show consistent use of keywords. Google looks at the page titles, URLs, and blog post content to determine what the blog is about. In order to drive more traffic to your blog, choose terms that get high search volume on Google.

To research descriptive keywords and phrases, visit Google Keyword Tool and Google Trends.

These tools provide details on:

What the public is searching for
How much competition there is for a certain keyword or phrase
How many searches are done monthly for a certain keyword or phrase
Other keyword phrases related to your topic that have a high search volume

The more you understand about how your target audience searches, the more likely you are to succeed in optimizing for quality keywords. To develop a list of keywords for your blog, use these tips:

Keep your keywords highly relevant to your blog
Choose keyword options that have relatively low competition
Make sure that there is relatively high search volume for your keywords or phrases

Using Internal Links Within Content

Ryan St. Germaine — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:39:00 +0000

An Internal Link is a link on your blog that points to another page on your blog. Creating internal links helps increase the pages viewed by each unique visitor to your site. It also helps search engines to navigate and index all of the pages on you blog. Here’s how:

Internal linking increases page views by enticing visitors to read related articles. For example, at the bottom of this post, you’ll see a list of posts related to the one I’m writing now. When you click these links, you’ll go to another post on my site.

Here are some additional ways to increase the amount of internal links on your blog:

Link keywords or phrases in your posts to other posts on your site
Use a sitemap
Use Categories to create links to your most relevant content
Break up longer posts into a series of posts that link to each other
Create a monthly blog summary that links to all of the posts you created that month
Create an FAQ section

Search engines use internal links on your website to crawl and index pages. When you link to a page using relevant anchor text, Google will associate that page with the keywords you use. For example – if you link to a page with the phrase “dog grooming” and the page you link to has the keyword phrase “dog grooming”, Google will assume that the page is about dog grooming. When you have a lot of internal links along with inbound links pointing to your blog using a keyword or phrase, you will rank highly when someone searches for those words or phrases on Google.