Posted by This isn’t my first blog on the web. I’ve been making posts on Blogger.com since 2005. I recently went back and reviewed some of my old posts from the early days. Many posts were about budgethomepage.com and things that were happening in my life. A lot of my early posts consisted of one short paragraph that would have little interest to anyone outside of my friends and family. Not the kind of content that would attract a large following. The topics that have received the most views are about computer and tech related topics. In the last two years, I’ve been making longer posts on a variety of current topics. But, posts about computers still get the most views. Blogger doesn’t have a good place for keywords, other than the title and content of your post. They have something called “Labels”, which I thought were for keywords. But, it turns out that Labels are used to help you organize your posts by topic. I recently went through the last two years of my posts and added topics to the label field. Then, added a widget to the right side of the screen that contains a list of topics. Clicking on a topic link brings up all of the posts that have that Label.
It works pretty well to organize your posts, but as far as helping to get more views, I don’t think that is going to help. You need to have a title on your post that search engines will like. Something like the one on this post would be a good example (281 million results). Next, the content of your post needs to be highly informative and entertaining. After posting for 16 years, I’m still trying to get better at that part of it. Meanwhile, search engines keep changing the rules about how they rank web content. Just when you think you have it figured out, things change. Usually for the worse and you are left trying to understand why no one is reading your blog or visiting your website. I’ve tried various affiliate links over the years. The only one that seems to work well is Google’s Adsense.
Google provides a lot of controls for creating the ads that you use. Google’s Analytics also gives you a lot of good info about visitors. But, just like their search engine, Google has changed their web tools many times over the years. It can sometimes make you want to give up, because its so hard to keep pace of the changes. I delete all emails trying to sell me SEO (search engine optimization) services. It feels like cheating when you pay someone to trick the system into ranking your content higher. You would think that a well written post would be enough to get noticed on the web. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. These days you need to try harder than ever to get people’s attention. I guess that is why I see so many creators on YouTube using “mouth open, hands on side of face” thumbnails on their video content. Someone probably figured out that you can get X% more views by doing that, even though it looks foolish. I’ve only made a few hundred dollars from ads on my websites over the years. So, my sage advice comes with that caveat. I’m going to try inserting the titles of my posts into a search engine, to make sure results are a high number. Many times, basic optimization is a step that gets neglected.