Search Engine Optimization on mylifeincanada

Last week's social media lecture dealt with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and ways to make one's own website more appealing to giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing.
To get more attention from search engines, it is important to place keywords - because that's what we do when we search the web, we enter keywords. So what makes mylifeincanada interesting? It sums up the experiences of a German student in a strange environment, delivers awesome pictures from travels and has some off-topic articles about social media and my experiences in the corporate world.

What am I talking about?

Let's focus on the travel-pictures: Keywords would be "city trip", "Canada", "North America", "tourism" and "place of interest", paired with the city's names "Toronto", "Ottawa", "Niagara Falls", as well as "nature", "wildlife", "summer", "Canadian fall" and "coulourful leaves". While adjusting keywords we also have to think about labelling the photos that are shown on the blog. Titles such as "IMG_9160" might help keeping track of my data on the hard drive, but are actually not search engine friendly. The next pictures to be uploaded will be labelled at least with the travel destination's name and another tag such as "spring", "sunny" or something similar. Also we have to make sure not use underscores but hyphens in the labeling because they are not being recognized by Google etc.
We can even check if our keywords work and when the demand is highest by using Google trends.

Where to put the keywords like "Canada", "wildlife" and "nature"?

I have been fairly effective in putting keywords in the title of my blog posts, but there can be way more done. For instance, it is always effective to put keywords in H1, H2 or H3 headlines, I'm going to label my subheaders from now on.
A new page description would also be advantageous to the hit counter, I have changed it from "A German in the great white north - pictures, travelog, university-related stuff" to "Travelog, pictures and advice from a German in Canada: Citytrips, touristy-stuff and beautiful nature shots in the summer, fall and winter in Southern Ontario"
And of course the keywords need to be included into the basic articles, which is pretty difficult when one wants the photos to talk for themselves.

I could do more linking!

The internet consists of links and links are being taken into account when it comes to the value of a webpage to search engines. Therefore I am going to try to post some related stuff on here as often as possible. This should be easy since I'm not the only German studying part-time in Canada. For example, pay a visit to Anne's blog Meeting Canada.

Analytics, Analytics and more Analytics

What post gets the most attention? Why is that? Can I do another post with similar content to reach the same attention? Answering those questions is being supported by Blogger's analytics-tool. It is not as detailed and comfortable as Facebook's analytics but is still offering me all kinds of information about the visitors to my blog - country, operating system, time of access.

Let's see if the changes will work