For the past week, I have been spending my time (in between having a relaxing Thanksgiving, and working on paying writing projects) tweaking this blog to try to boost its Google rankings. I’ve learned tons, and some of it’s even paid off. For a brief, glorious moment last night, this blog was the #1 hit–yes, seriously–on Google for the search terms freelance writer dc. And for about three days, Googling for Rachel Kaufman would bring up this blog on page 1 (though not the top result).

Yet this morning, everything’s back to normal. If someone’s looking for a freelance writer in my area, they’ll have to go to the fourth page of results before finding me. Page 4 out of however many freelance writers isn’t bad, but I’d like to be higher up (so does everyone, right?). So, I may have a long way to go, but here’s what I’ve learned so far. I figure if a novice like me can get even some results with just a week’s worth of tinkering, anyone can do this stuff.

1. Your markup determines, in part, how Google crawls your blog. In other words, those <h1> tags that make text bigger? Bad idea to use them indiscriminately, as they also tell search engine robots “This is the most important thing on the page.” Only one thing should be <h1> on each page and that’s usually your post title. So, the first thing I did was modify my theme so that my blog title is enclosed by <h2> tags instead.
2. Second, WordPress lets you specify whether your blog URLs look like gobbledygook or whether they’re human-readable. Not surprisingly, a URL that looks like English words (http://www.readwriterachel.com/topics/food/dc-good-to-go-area-street-carts-serve-variety/) is more robot-friendly than, say, http://readwriterachel.com/?post_id=24 . Which means nothing to me and search engine robots.
3. Third, this whole keyword density thing is easier than you’d think. I used Google Adsense’s Keyword Tool to generate a list of keywords I wanted to target. I sorted them by “advertiser competition” and chose keywords with a high search volume but low advertiser competition. I cross-checked the keywords against the number of hits that were returned by Google (there could be low ad competition but lots of search results anyway), then tried to work those keywords and phrases into my blog’s META tags, etc. It’s important not to be spammy about this; a keyword density of 10% or higher looks like spam to search bots. Besides, 3-5% should be more than enough (or at least, it’s gotten me results already).

There you have it: three easy ways to optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. Like I said, if I can do this (I’m a writer, remember? A words person, not a techie) anyone can. Here’s to page 1 of Google once again!