Life According to Krista

Aram Zucker-Schraff from the Office of Student Media talked about search engine optimization.

This is the act of getting your articles to the top of Google and other search engines.

Title, description, and keywords are all the most important things for search engine optimization.

The description tag is a summary of what your site/article is about. On WordPress you would use the excerpt box. Make sure you put keywords that people will search in this box. The keywords tab also helps people view your site when searching for specific phrases. Talk about events, locations, products, people, companies, and yourself in these keywords.

Pick niche keywords to get more web traffic. Be specific in your selection of keywords.

Link to and from your website. This helps . Link events to homepages, locations, about, and more. Link related content. This can help increase your web traffic because people who look at the blogs you site may end up looking at your site as well.

If you’re talking about a person, link to their Twitter, Linked-In, or other sites about them. If you are talking about a company link to their product page.

Link with transparency and common sense. Make sure everything you link is related to your blog somehow and use the correct words to link the sites.

PageRank is used by Google to determine relevance of your site to certain terms. The more people that look at your site or link to your site, the higher your page is rated.

“.edu” sites get a higher rank from PageRank.

If someone links to your site, you will get a higher ranking on PageRank. The higher the page rank of the site that links to yours, the higher up you will be on the search engine.

Ask friends to link to specific articles on your site. You can also use Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. to link to your articles and boost your ranking. Do not use sites that say they will help your ranking. List your sites on Googleplus to significantly raise your site search-ability. Google will penalize you for trying to cheat the system.

Google Webmaster tools, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Website Grader are all important sites to see what search engines think about your website.

Be consistent in tagging your posts.