So far, this search engine optimization effort has been a huge success. For example:
| Future of
Health IT 30-day Moving Average of Page Views |
June 2 was the day I did my first changes to the blog to make it more visible to search engines. I wish I could claim to be a genius in doing this, but all I'm doing is following the consensus advice I've obtained from SEO gurus and in particular from WebPosition 4's analysis of what I was doing wrong. Let's see what else we can do to make my blog famous.
Hyperlink URL
I've been advised to consider decreasing the keyword count in the URLs in my page's hyperlinks. I'm not sure I can actually do that at this point, if I haven't done it already by removing some of the sidebar items. Unfortunately, blogs don't offer a lot of control over the hyperlinks they generate. I suspect that TypePad does offer some if we get into the weeds by editing the template, but let's see whether we can find some lower-hanging fruit before we take that route.
Body Text
I apparently have a lot of mentions of my keyword phrase ("future of health it") in the body text of my blog (visible text not in headings or hyperlink anchor text) - maybe twice as many as I'm supposed to have by WebPosition 4's estimate. I'm supposed to reduce them. My overall word count is also way high, like three times the max of the range I'm supposed to be in.
On the other hand, I'm not doing so well in terms of keyword prominence. I can increase this by moving instances of my keyword phrase closer to the beginning of the body text.
By the way, if you need some definitions of terms related to keywords, for example density and prominence, you can find some good definitions over at Mike's Marketing.
Entire Page
Overall, I've got almost three times as many instances of the keyword as I'm advised to have. This is the sum of all the instances I've discussed so far - title, keywords, hyperlink anchor text, URLs, headings, and body text. My page is bloated in terms of overall word count as well, again almost three times the advised amount.
Strategy
To accomplish the reductions I'm advised to do, I'm going to have to reduce the number of posts on my blog's home page. I do this on the Configure tab, choosing the Preferences dialog.
A step I've already taken is to break my post up into a lead-in and a main body, where the main body appears only if my readers choose to read the whole post. If you haven't already done this, you start a new post, then choose the Customize the display of this page link at the bottom; in the popup dialog, make sure "Extended Posts" is checked.
I'll report back in a few days with a progress report and a review of everything we've learned so far.
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