Page 3 on Google for one of my posts. Thoughts on replicating and improving.

byAliMos

404 followers

5 years ago

I've been doing a spot of overdue page rank checking for the posts on my website, and was really happy to see that one post published in January had made it to page 3 on Google! None of my other posts so far have made it anywhere close to top rankings for its own keyword phrase - I gave up on each keyword phrase when I got to page 15.

It got me thinking, what should I be doing differently to get my posts ranking higher on Google? I'm hoping that this brief analysis will be of interest to others as they are deciding on keywords for their posts.

Keyword phrases

My posts seem to be falling into 3 broad categories: book & product reviews; diary type posts; and how-to type posts.

If I use the title of the book in the title of a book review post, then I am competing with the likes of Amazon, WHSmith, Waterstones, to name but a few. So from now on I'm going to look for a different hook for the review.

The same applies to product reviews, although I've only done one so far. Interestingly, when I did my keyword search for this product review (a 'hot composter'), that particular post didn't feature, but a separate post that I'd written around the use of the same product ('making compost') did make it onto page 4 of Google - although not when searched for on its own keyword phrase. That's interesting, and made me realise that the more posts I create, the more chance there is that some posts will rank well for a given keyword phrase (even if not as originally intended), and at the end of the day it doesn't matter how people are directed to my site, it matters that they are.

Another thing that I found was getting lots of results for pages completely unrelated to my post, just because one word in the keyword phrase has more than one meaning. My website is about fruit and veg gardening at home, so some post titles include the word 'bed' - as in 'vegetable bed'. But of course you also get beds in hotels and holiday related sites, which meant that these posts were drowned out by hotel and accommodation pages. Presumably Google doesn't know the difference. So it's important to minimise the likelihood of search engines misunderstanding your keywords. A beginner's error perhaps - but then I am a beginner!

I'm beginning to wonder if my keyword phrases are too broad. As I've just said, my niche is about fruit and veg growing at home. Not gardening in general. But looking at some of the posts I've written, it's impossible to tell the difference. So again, my posts are getting drowned out by other, irrelevant, pages. So from now on, I'm going to really focus on getting keyword phrases that rank well and are really drilled down into my niche. And indeed, there's no reason why I shouldn't go back and change the titles of some of the posts I've already written.

Using social media

I also noticed as I was scanning fruitlessly for my own posts, that many of the top ranked pages were from Pinterest, so I've made a note to start using Pinterest much more. I'm just at that point in the WA training, so I'm beginning to understand how it all hangs together.

Search engine optimisation - science or art?

I know it's still very early days for me and my website, and maybe I should simply be concentrating at this stage on creating content. Search engine optimisation really does seem to be a mysterious art.

I don't want to gabble on unnecessarily, so I'll leave it there. But a few final thoughts, questions really. Is there always a time lag between publishing a page and it ranking well on search engines, or can pages jump straight to high rankings simply because they are from a well-recognised source? And why, when I search for my own pages, do I see pages with titles that bear absolutely no relation at all to the keyword phrase I have used? Why should they rank above mine? Even foreign-language pages.

Thanks for reading, and it would be great to hear other tips on creating the most effective keyword phrases.