Social Media Guide for Wattpad

Google Search

Search Engines and SEO, Revisited

We already talked about SEO in the Blogging, Part 3 chapter. To reiterate, the bottom line is, you need to make your work discoverable by search engines.  Your initial goal should be to appear in the first three pages of search results. But your ultimate goal should be to appear in the first three to five results on the first page.

Keywords, Tags, and Categories

These bits of organization (different kinds of sites call them different things, but they serve similar albeit not identical purposes) help people find your stuff. Too many, and it just looks like you’re serving up scattershot, unfocused content. Too few, and your content can’t be readily found. 

For Goldilocks and the Three Bears, you might tag it as fairy tale, children’s book, moral lesson, or even adventure story or talking bears. But run a search first. What happens when you use any of these phrases as your search parameters (try with and without encasing the phrases in double quotation marks)? Do you get a million hits? A thousand? One hundred million? A smaller number of hits means your phraseology is very specific, and is only useful if people know exactly what they’re looking for. A very large number of hits means that your phraseology is very broad, and it’s hard to break into the top three pages of results. Both can be helpful; both can work in terms of getting you search engine traction, but they’ve both got their pluses and minuses. By the way, focused, long phrases; because they are generally connected to people who know what they’re looking for, those search phrases are also more likely to be used by people who are ready to convert (e. g. to buy a book or read it or whatever your overall purpose is).

Google+ to the rescue!

By making myself a Google Verified Author, and linking my new Google+ page (it was only two days old when I checked this), Social Media Puppy, to my Google+ profile, I made it to the first page of results, second and third results, when the phrase Social Media Puppy is put into double quotes. Now that some time has elapsed, without the quotes, the site still shows up, on the first page and as a callout on the right side, if you’re signed into Google. Not bad for a site that’s still pretty new. 

Oh, and it shows up as on the first page if you Google social media puppy google+ and don’t use any quotation marks at all. 

Good ranking for one will help to bring up the others. Google is already saying – da puppy is someone we like and trust. And so whatever da puppy writes, we like it. This rising tide lifts all of the boats.

Optimizing Everything

You have all sorts of opportunities for telling Google what’s important within your work. Don’t say everything is important. That’s not true. You need to be more focused. 

Let’s look at blogs. You could just toss out a bunch of words with no formatting, no category, no tagging, no links, no related posts, and no image. However, if you add all of these elements, you’ll be giving Google the lowdown that these things are important. 

Let’s go back to Goldilocks. Your blog post could add a public domain image of the model or actress you see as looking like her. Caption it something like – this is how I see Goldilocks (and be a really good netizen and give the model or actress’s name if you know it and a link to her site, if she has one, and be sure to properly credit the photographer). One section could be a plot summary. You could title it Plot Summary (I realize how obvious it looks to the human eye, but the search engine doesn’t understand things unless you spell them out). Use the Heading 1 (H1) formatting for the title of the post and then the Heading 2 (H2) formatting for that (and every other) subsection. It stands out better and, just as importantly, Google understands that this is important. Add the categories and tags I mentioned above. Categories are intended to be larger and more encompassing. You might categorize this work as fiction, or children’s. Tagging is intended to be more specific, so maybe tag it as something like fairy tale, if you don’t write too many of those. 

For related posts, my favorite methods are as follows – first, if you already have a great deal of content in your blog, interlink your older content with your newer. In my writing blog, I refer back to older stories and characters all the time. For the first reference, I link back to any older post I may have on that character or story. The second method is to use a WordPress plugin called Zemanta. This plugin can provide related content from other WordPress bloggers and it can also help you find usable images and credit them properly to their creators.  This helps you follow the Rule of Thirds, by giving you a means of sharing others’ content pretty effortlessly. The plugin is free and is easy to use. I don’t know if Blogger has anything comparable. 

I do caution you, though, to read whatever you’re linking to before you hit publish. Sometimes the matches are hit or miss, and every now and then there’s something on WordPress (this is to be expected on such an enormous service) that is unsavory and should be reported to them as a violation of their Terms of Service. But most of what’s offered up is perfectly fine content. Does it work? Yes; I’ve gotten followers, comments, and likes from doing this. 

Just as importantly, I keep seeing my posts and pages rising in the search rankings. Am I famous? Nah; and I most likely never will be. But I can be found. 

The link is to my blog post for class about how Google+ helped with Google search. I think you’ll recognize the image. ;) The YouTube video is the video accompanying my class assignment and is more or less on point. 

Did this chapter help you? Did it hold your interest? Do you want to see more? Then please vote! You know the puppy wants you to. ;)