Do me a favor. Open up a new tab and navigate to Google. Search for “Healthy College Blog” or some variation thereof. You will be greeted with 124 million results. The very first of which is Strong Like My Coffee, a WordPress blog just like this one.

Strong Like My Coffee is my personal blog that I created and have updated for the past three years. (Go ahead, take a look if you care to!) It began in July 2012 as a personal outlet to keep my own recipes, workouts, and healthy habits.

I was ecstatic when it reached 100 followers in one month. Little did I know that over the next year, a few posts would become ‘viral’ on Pinterest drawing in almost 300,000 readers.

When Google finds a million matches for the key words in the search bar….how does it decide which page gets the glorified top spot? Chances are, readers will not look beyond page three of the search results. Have you ever thought about how much data is on the internet for nearly every topic under the sun? That is why “SEO” is such a hot term right now and digital marketers are seeking out new strategies to compete for their search result status.

We don’t pay Google. We don’t bake the Google-bots cookies. We don’t respond to those spam emails offering SEO consulting for a low, low fee of $299. It is not random.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is a set of techniques that allow you to prevail over your ‘competition’ in the search results. Optimization techniques ensure that search engines crawl your site and attach your site to certain key words.

My Experience with SEO:

• The trick that has been the most successful for Strong Like My Coffee in becoming the #1 health and fitness college blog is providing links to your website on external sites. The more other people share and reblog your page, the higher your ranking.
• Take advantage of social media platforms. The most useful platform for me was Pinterest. Pinterest displays one image from your post that is linked to your webpage. A user who clicks on the image is taken directly to your site via a link. Pinterest’s advantages are the widespread audience who will see each “pin” and the increased number of external links to your website with each “repin.”
• Include your website URL in the signature line of any email correspondence. (This link will carry on in any forwarded versions of the conversation.)
• Update your webpage consistently. New regularly-updated content is rated higher on search results. Maintaining your page regularly with content that contains the key words you are optimizing for will increase your ranking.
• Lastly, USE the tags and description boxes. Insert the key phrases that you think users will search for to find your content. This helps the search engines understand what each page is about when they place your site on the search results.

I hope you found some useful information with these. I am no expert myself, so if you have any tips of your own you would like to share, feel free to leave a comment below! (Leaving comments on other blogs with your web address is also an effective networking tool that increases your search engine visibility!)