How to make Google your real estate weblog’s best friend
Who can probe all the mysteries of Google? Not me, and I don’t even do referrals on the subject. But I can give you a 93% solution to the problem, and you can worry about the other 7% when you’re not too busy handling incoming traffic.
What’s the secret? Like this: Relevance equals Title plus Headline plus Body Copy. If those three elements are in close correspondence, to Google the article is what it says it is. If that sounds like a Zestimate of a burned down house, it’s because it is. Software cannot evaluate objectively, it can only draw inferences from trusted indicators. If you leave a trail of indicators that Google associates with highly-relevant content, then it is highly-relevant content.
I’ve talked about writing headlines and body copy that are long-tail keyword rich. If you have a WordPress weblog, here’s a way to get your post’s title to correspond to its headline:
<title>
<?php wp_title(" "); ?>
<?php if(wp_title(" ", false)) { echo " | "; } ?>
YourBlogName |
Your blog's tagline...
</title>
Here is what that code says:
If there is a headline, show it as the title of the page. On your main page, there is no title. On archive or category pages, the archive or the category will be the title.
If we did show a title, lay down a vertical bar as punctuation.
Then show the weblog’s name and tag line, separated by a vertical bar.
Altogether, the code means that when your post is shown as a standalone weblog entry, the title of that page will be the headline of the post. This is the way Google will see it for indexing purposes. And what that means is that Google will regard your post as being highly relevant.
You can snag a copy of the code you see here by copying it or by clicking here. The file you need to edit is named “header.php”. You’ll find it in the folder for your active theme inside the “themes” folder of the “wp-content” folder of the WordPress installation on your file server. You want to replace the existing title tag with your edited version of the code shown here. If you don’t know exactly what I just said, take this problem to someone who does.
The cool thing is, once you made this change, Google will index all your old pages with their new titles, as well. In the long run, all of your long-tail keywords should benefit.
June 27th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
[...] All that is as may be, and there is a point at which SEO debates are as interesting to me as PBS documentaries. What is interesting to me is epistemological method that goes into making decisions. It really doesn’t make any difference how you code your permalinks, because, beneficial or damaging, any benefit or damage is going to be trivial compared to other things you can do to improve your SEO performance, notably boosting your Page Rank or writing strong posts with strong headlines (and putting your headline in your <title> tag). [...]
September 13th, 2008 at 8:13 am
Great information Greg, I think that google is just not that smart when it comes to some things, but you cannot beet them, so you have to join them, and work on their terms if you want to be in their index. Thanks for the great information and the reminder of how google works.