Do you know how to think like the Google spider?
That’s what James Ku of the Reno Gazette-Journal says you must learn to do to improve page views on your website.
Ku, RGJ’s web editor, and Chris Murray, the paper’s assistant sports editor and University of Nevada sports beat reporter, co-presented a session entitled “Effective blogging on college/pro beats” during the APSE West Regional meeting, Nov. 8 in Reno.
Ku explained to editors the value of SEOs (Search Engine Optimization), taking them through an unconventional hands-on demonstration and Murray explained his process in improving hits to his “Pack” blog from roughly 50,000 to nearly 200,000.
Murray says his goal is to get people to bookmark his blog. He says he spends about three hours per day blogging, posting an average of 10 blogs per day.
“Try to be as interactive as possible,’’ he says as a way to attract readers, keep them on the site longer and keep them coming back for more.
He showed an example of an interactive Yahoo! map that he had placed on his blog. The map plotted where players on the university’s men’s basketball team had come from. Each locator linked to a profile of the player with more detail.
The RGJ filters Murray’s blog through its main news page to show its importance — “treating blogs as news” — and to also attract readers that may not normally click through to the sports site.
“You want to build (reader) time on the page that can be monetized in the future,’’ Murray said.
Murray said another way he tries to maximize his blog’s exposure is by holding items and scheduling them to post at peak traffic times: 8 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. on weekdays when people are at work, just starting their day, coming back from lunch and just ending their day. He said that’s when they tend to check the web for news.
As for the Google’s search engine spider — used to feed pages to search engines; also known as a webcrawler — Ku explained how keywords, history and links can drastically improve a webpage’s ranking in search engine results.
Editors were asked to wear black blindfolds. Ku circled the room, placing an object in front of each editor. On his signal, editors were asked to feel the item and shout out words that best described what they felt. Blindfolded, the editors were acting as the search engine spider, trying to identify the item. In a second demonstration, blindfolded editors were given a sheet of paper and asked to describe the story on the paper. Since the editors couldn’t see the words, Ku offered key words to help the editors try to identify the story.
“Finally!” Ku said.
“We Win!” He offered.
“Giants win the world series,” one editor responded.
“No,” Ku said, offering another headline.
“Worth the wait.” …
And on it went for a few more minutes, Ku offering clues and the editors failing to get it right.
The story was on the Phillies’ 2008 World Series title. Had the year been included in one of the clues — it was not — the editors may have guessed correctly, Ku said.
The point of the exercise was to show how hammer headlines don’t work with search engines.
“Google always goes to look at headlines first,” Ku said.
Other tips from Ku and Murray:
*- Google rewards you for linking to other sites and for being linked by other sites.
*- Google has a memory of popular sites and hot topics.
*- Have an automated Omniture report sent to you to better understand traffic for your blogs.
*- You can buy search words from Google to maximize exposure from big events.
*- Without space limitations on the website, be as creative and in depth as possible.
