Top in Google Search Results: Another Self-Check of My Blogging Results in the Search Engines -- My Blog Posts are Doing Very Well

Today, I did another "spot check" of how my personal blog posts are performing in various search engines, Google as well as Yahoo and Ask.com. (I didn't bother with Bing, maybe I'll go back and check Bing later.  I don't like Bing, it's a personal thing.)

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my blog posts are doing very, very well in search results.  I'm very happy, truth be told:  many of these posts were written pre-Panda much less Penguin and Hummingbird.

Why are my posts so successful in grabbing and holding the top search result spots in searches numbering in the millions?

I've got posts written 7 or 8 years ago that are holding in the top results on the first page of searches with literally millions of results provided.  That's wonderful, and I'm proud of this accomplishment.

Now, what am I doing?  I'm not posting daily - heck, on my fiction blog I'm rarely posting at all.  I'm not buying keywords and I'm not researching SEO for hours here.

Here's what I believe:  I think I'm getting these results because I have always written with the reader in mind and how they will be searching for the information (not how Google will organize it).

Bottom line, my consistency in top Google search results is, in my humble opinion, because I have always written with the idea of sharing information with my reader.  I ponder who my reader is -- and what they will be putting into that Google search bar to find the information that I have for them.  The readers of my simplicity blog are not the same as the readers of my lawyer-writer blog, for example.

Google wants to help the reader and the top results will be those sites (articles, posts) with content that best serves the query entered by that person.  Experts now opine that writers of web content wanting to get top results in the Google search engine should be pondering "topics" in queries instead of keywords.  

Which sorta goes with my attitude on web writing since I first started back in 2004: my goal is helping people with what I'm placing on the web, and I'm thinking about who these people are and how to reach them.  I'm not targeting Google, I'm targeting the people who I want to read my work.  

Focusing efforts on helping the reader instead of cracking Google's algorithms works.  

Attached below and viewable in Scribd is  my December 2013 Spot Check.  The Attachment with screenshots of the search engine results themselves as supporting documentation is also available on my Scribd page.

Granted, not all of my posts are number one with a bullet in every search engine query.  However, a lot of them are -- and given my track record on word count and my past posting schedule, I'm really happy with what I've found today -- particularly after Google's big change regarding keyword SEO.

A few examples from today's Spot Check:

Yahoo Query: should you use legalzoom rocketlawyer 
EverydaySimplicity has the 1st entry of 11 entries on the 1st page (total results for this search = 591,000) for a post written on August 9, 2008 (my post is 5 years, 4 months old)

Google Query: win flea war with salt 
EverydaySimplicity has the 1st entry of 10 entries on the 1st page (total results for this search = 58,600,000) for a post written on June 20, 2012 (my post is 1 year, 6 months old)

Google Query: admitting tweets as evidence 
RebaKennedyLawyerWriter has the 1st entry of 10 entries on the 1st page (total results for this search = 4,660,000) for a post written on February 28, 2011 (my post is 2 years, 10 months old)

Google Query: lonely at the keyboard 
RebaKennedyLawyerWriter has the 10th entry of 10 entries on the 1st page (total results for this search = 7,600,000) for a post written on November 9, 2007 (my post is 6 years, 1 month old) 

Google Query: elements of thriller vs mystery 
RebeccaKennedy has the 10th entry of 10 entries on the 1st page (total results for this search = 4,140,000) for a post written on November 24, 2006 (my post is 7 years, 1 month old)

Google Query: Texas child protective services workers arrested 
BackseatLawyer has the 5th entry of 10 entries on the 1st page (total results for this search = 2,000,000) for a post written on September 30, 2013 (my post is 4 months old)

Here is my full Spot Check:

Google Alerts, Social Mention, and Spiral 16: Tracking Topics and Trends on the Web

Hopefully, you are aware of Google Alerts, a tool provided by Google, for free (as always) that notifies you when your name, your product, or just about anything under the sun is being discussed online. Google Alerts will let you know if your name has made the local news, for example, or if your daughter's soccer team got mentioned for winning regionals.

There are other sites that can help you keep track of things, too - Google isn't alone out there. Here are two for you to try:

1. Spiral 16

2. Social Mention.

Both of these services provide similar information to Google Alerts, but they target social media and they give more info to you than just links. Check them out, they are useful tools for you.

How?  Names are just one thing to search.  I have alerts set up, for example, under the phrase "death penalty" because I co-author a blog on capital punishment. (FYI, I also have an alert set up for that topic at Google Scholar, it's proven to be very helpful, too.)

Setting Up EMail Alerts: Try Google Alerts and TweetBeep

Alerts.  They are easy to set up and you want to have a few set up -- but what are they?  Alerts are where software automatically discovers new web content that includes a particular word or phrase and sends you  an email to let you know that something new has appeared. 

It's easy enough to do.  Have your name, your firm name, a topic of interest (e.g., "death penalty" or "american idol"), etc. set up with an alert system and then sit back and wait for the emails to arrive.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts will automatically let you know when new stuff appears within its search results.  For details, go here.

TweetBeep

TweetBeep searches Twitter and alerts you as you have requested - exclusively within tweets.  To learn more, go here. 

Internet Marketing for Lawyers: All About This Google Page Rank Business

There's lots of chatter on the web about Google's PageRank and how lots of pages have suddenly been "demoted" ... here, I've gathered together a collection of links on the topic:

1. Google's explanation of its PageRank;

2. The ever-changing Wikipedia article on PageRank;

3. Phil Craven's article at WebWorkshop, explaining how PageRank works and introducing the concept of LinkFarms;

4. Matt Cutts' e-mail to SearchEngineJournal, where he confirms that the recent alteration of PageRank was due to paid links (lots of comments here);

5. And now, the blog commentary: Problogger, SearchEngineGuide, and
Entrepreneur's Journey.

Number of Visits, Visit Length, Visitor Path

I don't know about you, but I'm more interested in the length of visits to a site, and the path the visitor took to get there, than I am in the number of visits. Sure, it's nice (and important) to have lots of traffic. But if all that traffic amounts to a visit length of zero seconds, and no return visits, then what purpose is being served?