About this retirement hobby, blog writing. I wrote a retirement blog a short while ago about improving my blog readership figures. I said I’d done two things. One was to ask my IT guy for some advice. I’ll return to this strategy in a moment. I also wrote that I was going to place an advert in The Oldie magazine.
I’ve now done both of these things and I can make an early report on the impact of the first of these strategies. The December issue of The Oldie has just hit the streets and I can honestly say I see little or no impact on my figures but, as I say, early days.
On Wednesday I had a meeting with my IT guy so he could explain to me what he had done and what he wanted me to do with it. Again it’s early days but after the meeting I understood a bit more about what he had done and more importantly what he wanted me to do.
He has installed a piece of software entitled Rank Math SEO. No I don’t quite know what that means either. My way of thinking of it is it’s an idiot’s guide to a blog’s SEO effectiveness. Or to put it another way how high up on Google the blog comes. Given that people searching for a particular item on Google are only (it is said) inclined to search on the first page of Google, if you want to attract people to your site you need to be on that first page.
This retirement blog currently ranks in about 9th position on this first page but at least it’s there. But it was /is slipping down the ranking. There is I think one good reason for this but I haven’t the space to write about it now, maybe in a later blog.
There was a time not so long ago when I was first or there abouts but those days are gone and I’m happy to be on the first page at all. Almost all the other retirement blogs on the first page are of the sort, 25 top blogs or 10 expert retirement bloggers top tips.
So here was his first suggestion to improve my ranking, I should write one of these. And this was our first point of disagreement. I’m not prepared to do this, so next. This idea was to have, what I would have called when writing academic text books or articles, chapter or section headings. I regarded these as essential guides for the reader and a large section of text without headings would, in this context, have been a complete no-no. I needed clarity in whatever the topic was.
But, and it’s a big but, I did not want this in my blog. They’re only 1,000 words long and I would be the first to admit they’re a ramble. As I’ve readily admitted I usually have no idea what they’re going to be about beyond a broad and vague notion when I sit down to write them. And not mucj more of an idea when I’ve finished. So paragraphs yes, but with headings, no. My blogs do not lend themselves to such things.*
There’s no doubt they (sub headings) do work because there’s a little score, marks out of 100 that changes as you make your ‘improvements’. Anything over 80 is good, he tells me, but my scores currently are in the 60’s, when he puts in, an entirely unnecessary sub-heading as I would call it, the score goes up into the 70s. No brainer you might think, but no, I am not prepared to prostitute my art to this degree. Partially yes, but not to this extent. See postscript.
The ‘idiot’s guide’ is seducing in that it makes a complex business of SEO ranking much clearer. There’s a lot I’m already doing (the focus key word is in the first 10% of the blog) and some I’m not (keyword density is low – I don’t use the word retirement over and over again). The ticks are reinforcing and the crosses at least show what needs to be done if I choose to do so.
One example of what I am prepared to do that I’m not currently doing is alter the format of the main title (in fact the only title in my blogs). See above. I’m trying to give them another key word which relates to retirement but is not retirement blog because apparently that’s already there in Google. Or a term that people search for when googling retirement. In the case of the above, it’s retirement hobbies. We’ll see.
Two other strategies to improve my score that I am prepared to employ are – giving the picture a title related to my keyword (the word that relates to retirement but which isn’t always that actual word – I need to look in a thesaurus for other similar terms). That’s OK I can at least try and do that. This time I tried bee-keeping as an image and an example of a retirement hobby – maybe?
Second, while I do a pretty good job of making internal links (i.e. to other of my own blogs), I don’t put in external links. For example he showed me how to put a link into the suburb of Chaddesden. The effect on the score out of 100 was impressive and I will do this again but it’s not always going to be that easy. But I’m happy with this strategy as it doesn’t interfere with the purity of my writing. Ha.
Retirement hobby summary
So I think that will do for now. No doubt, as I go on, I will become more familiar with these improvement strategies. I will as always keep you readers of this retirement blog informed.
*I lied, just tried it with above heading and as an experiment, it improved my score 3 points from 72 to 75. I mustn’t let this become an obsession.