Making Your Post Visible

[This is part 5 of a series of 5 articles on how to start a blog.  To view the main post, with links to all of the relevant content, read my post on Steps To Start A Blog.]

Now that you’ve published your first post, or any post for that matter, you need to put some effort into ensuring it gets read. You can create the best content in the world, but if a potential reader can’t find it, that doesn’t do you much good does it.

Getting Your Post Indexed

You really only need to worry about this once, and that’s after you publish the first post on your blog. Once Google has indexed your site the first time, it will continue to crawl your site on a regular basis.  If you’ve set up your sidebar to include links to your recent posts, Google will be able to see those links and follow them so that every subsequent post you create will also be indexed.

To be sure Google and Bing are able to index your site the first time, be sure that you submit your blog to their respective search engines.

Submit to Google:

https://www.google.com/submityourcontent/website-owner/#

Submit to Bing:

http://www.bing.com/toolbox/submit-site-url

Building Backlinks

Backlinks are other pages on the Internet that point or link to your content, and are a key mechanism of getting readers to your blog.  Backlinks are also a key component of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and are a key indicator to the search engines regarding the value of your post.  If you have a high-quality site linking to your blog content, Google looks very highly on that.

There are two types of backlinks that exist, those that are marked as “no follow” and those that are not (meaning it is a “do follow” link).  With a do follow link, Google and other search engines give your site credit for the incoming link. Meaning, you site gets credit for this link as part of the algorithm that the search engines use (helps your site rank higher).  With a no follow link, the search engines will follow that link to your site, but you don’t always receive credit for it (it’s doesn’t always help with your sites ranking).

Leaving comments on other blogs within your niche is a great way to get a no follow link.  You might be asking, why would I want a no follow link if the search engines won’t give me credit for it.  Great question!  Remember, while trying to rank well with the search engines, you are also trying to get readers to your site.  By leaving valuable comments on other blogs, readers of those other blogs will be able to see your comment, and follow the link back in your comment to your site.

Do follow links are much harder to get, and are somewhat out of scope for this post.  A great way to get do follow links is by networking with other blog owners, and trying to get Guest Posts on those blogs.  A guest post is simply a blog post you create for someone else’s site.  The advantage of doing a guest post, is you typically are allowed to put a link in that post back to your site.  So not only do you get a do follow link out of this, that the search engines will give you credit for, but readers of that blog post will also be able to link back to your site to read your content.  We’ll explore guest posting in more detail in later posts on this site.

Social Media

Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) is a great way for you to announce your blog content to your followers.  Most of us have one or more accounts on the popular social media sites, so why not leverage that to announce that you’ve got a new post on such and such.  This is a great way for you to build a reader base and draw additional followers to your account.