How to optimise your Steemit blog so it can be seen when people search on Google - Great for Promotional activity!

Three very simple Steemit SEO tricks to get your post more visible on Google searches.

Have a greater impact on your #promo-steem posts, and potentially get more views from outside the Steemit platform

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One of the conversations we've been having recently in the #promo-steem core team chats is how to utilise Steemit to get our posts right up there in Google searches...and especially posts which are promoting STEEM!

It came really from us planning our upcoming appearance at a major Cryptocurrency Expo in April, as we really want Steemit to be noticed and well associated with it if people do a search on "London Cryptocurrency Show".

I'm not going to go into the mechanics of SEO here, and I'm no expert on it, but I wanted to provide a few little pointers which could get Steemit posts seriously high up Google search rankings. Let's face it, if you aren't close to the top of page 1 of Google, you're really quite unlikely to be seen

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TIP #1: Optimising your title

Imagine you wanted to do a bit of promotional work, and write an article which you'd like to get high up on Google searches called "What is the best social media platform to make money on" and this is what you're going to call your post.... Steemit uses the title of the post to make the permalink (the URL, or the actual web address of the post).

The problem is, this title, whilst nice and easy for humans to read, contains a lot of what are called STOP words. In the case above, Google would ignore the words WHAT, IS, THE, BEST, TO, MAKE, and ON. Which leaves just "SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM MONEY" as the search term it would index. - not necessarily going to get you to the top, and if you do a search with these terms, you won't see a single Steemit article. (Try it!)

It's better to concentrate on the key words for search optimisation. In the case of this post, I simply want to use the keywords Steemit SEO, because I think people might search for this in the future!

But of course, that's not a particularly attractive post title for my article. I just want the URL to be that, but the post title to be something better, more like "How to get your Steemit posts visible on Google Searches", or "How to optimise your Steemit blog so it can be seen when people search on Google".

The trick is this....

Write your article as normal and post it making sure what's in the title is what you want Google to index it as. Once you've done this, then click the EDIT button, and change the title to the phrase you want people to actually see!

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TIP #2: Tagging your Images properly

If you upload a picture from your camera, it quite often has a random filename if you haven't already changed it to something more easy for you to find in your filelist.

Have you ever noticed how bloody annoying it is trying to find the picture you want when you have hundreds of them in a big list, all with generic filenames like this? Of course it's the same for Google. It just doesn't know what a picture is all about, and it looks for whats called ALT TEXT to try to understand what the picture is showing.

If you upload an image onto Steemit which already has a descriptive filename, then it should helpfully use the filename as the ALT TEXT. Great. But if it doesn't, or you have a random filename, you can alter the ALT TEXT simply by changing what's in the square brackets after the ! mark.

For example, here' s a picture of my daughter and me that I uploaded. It has the filename DSC_0069 which was helpfully made by my android phone when the picture was taken.

Now, of course, I want Google to know what this is all about so it can index it properly, so I'm going to change the ALT TEXT to something more descriptive...

And the net result is:

What a little cutie!!!

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TIP #3: Optimising your Meta Description

Google used to use the first 160 characters to create a meta description...that's the text that comes under the title when you do a search. But it's recently updated this to 360 characters.

This article from @salmanbahadur gives a more in depth overview of it and what it means.

Basically, the long and short of it is to make sure the first few lines of what you write in your text are something you'd like to see appear as the snippets in a Google search.

Why these things are important to #promo-steem Promoters

One of the key things we have going for us in the #promo-steem community is that we are all focussed on getting Steemit and the STEEM blockchain noticed. Making these small changes to the way you post content on the blockchain could have an absolutely massive impact on the way that Google starts to rank posts we are making. This is one of the more passive ways we can promote STEEM, and it only takes a few seconds to do so.

Because Steemit.com is now regarded as in the top 1000 authoritative sites in the world by Alexa (see my earlier post here), it is very possible that your #promo-steem posts have a good chance of making it into more and more Google searches.

This is very good for you, for #promo-steem, for STEEM in general.

And it's free to do, and only takes a few seconds more of your time when making a post.

Hope you found that useful
Love, light and laughter
Anarcotech x