Blogs & Websites: Keywords and Links

Blogs and Websites serve the purpose of providing useful information to viewers as well as promoting your writing skills. But if you don’t get any viewers and no one knows that your site(s) exist, your time will be wasted. People must be able to find your blog and/or Website, and it is up to you to direct them to your site.

Keywords help Internet users find your site. First of all you’ll use “Metatags” when you set up your site—which are hidden descriptions and keywords for search engines to pick up. Then after you create your keywords, you’ll need to update them occasionally to reflect any changes you might make to your site.

To create keywords, you’ll need to find the location of that function on the toolbar of your Webpage software program. Mine falls under “File,” “Properties,” “Keywords,” but yours might be listed under other headings.

To make it easier to come up with keywords, go to other Websites similar to yours and see what words they have used. If you use Internet Explorer to search the Internet, you’ll find the place where keywords are listed in the toolbar under “View,” then “Source,” or it might be under “Page" then "View Source.” There under something called “meta description,” “meta keywords,” or something similar you can list the words that people searching the Internet would use to find your site.

The other important step you need to take to get viewers to your site is to provide and exchange links. If you’re familiar with sites that are related to yours, or that provide additional information that might be of interest to your readers, provide a link to those sites. On my software program, I go to “Insert,” then to “Hyperlink” to add links.

It’s also a good idea to ask the owners of sites that are similar to yours or that your viewers might logically also go to, if you can exchange links. Some site owners are happy to do this while others might be afraid of losing their viewers to your site, so won’t exchange links.

Be sure to read the instructions for your Website design software to learn as much as you can so that you can take full advantage of all its features. If you set up a blog, the instructions are usually fairly comprehensive and are easy to follow.