Social Media: Using Twitter Trending Topics to Boost Readership

Like most of you, I’ve been ignoring the Trending Topics on the sidebar of my Twitter page. In a real Homer Simpson moment, I hit my head and moaned “doh!” when I realized the opportunities missed by not utilizing this free and totally useful tool.

Looking at October 21sts’ trending topics I saw two related topics to posts that were already online. One was “Halloween” the other was the “Google Wave”. While I haven’t written anything on the Google Wave itself, Astroblogging has two posts on using Google Analytics. No matter that these posts were already in the blogosphere, people want to know about these things NOW. So it was off to the tinyurl page to make bite sized Twitter friendly links to the posts and up they go.

To get your two seconds of fame on Twitter make sure that you post tags about your content. Tags are very easy, the sign “#” signifying a tag plus your keyword. For A Neptune Tale: The Devil You Know the tag looks like this #astrology, #Halloween.

Let me know if this works for you.

Promoting Your Astrology Blog: Keywords and Search Words

To the left is not an instance of blog deja vu, but an illustration of Google’s Search Engines’ inventory of the keywords and search words on a recent blog post. Its no secret that to drive traffic you need to get the attention of the search engines, though some people aren’t sure how far to go with them. This recent post shows quantity counts. The more of a keyword or search word that you use, the more likely it is that Google will recognize that your post is actually about the subject you are writing about.

What you don’t see from this illustration is that Google inventoried everything on the page to see if the content was relevant to the search. The blog title was inventoried, as well as the titles of recent posts categories and also the titles of the Blog Roll. Talk about being thorough!

Since Saturn, from the way the post was written was mentioned umpteem times, the Search Engine felt confident enough, even though in Google’s eyes this blog is only days old, to list this post within the Top Ten results on the search “Saturn Astrology”.

SEO Tip: Check Yourself!

How do you know if your blog site is effective? One of my favorite tools is Website Grader who will, gratis, grade your site and give you helpful hints and tips on how to optimize it. Not only that, but you can choose other websites to compare with yours.

Below is the results of my most recent analysis. I chose ElsaElsa and Jeffrey Kishner’s Seduction Central to compare my site with, not because I consider them similar blogs, but for their popularity in the astro blogging world.

There is a a mixed bag for all of us. While Elsa tops out at 99.3% rating, (way to go Elsa!), her blog rank is slightly behind mine, most probably because she has a smaller number of inbound links. I consider inbound linking one of the major stumbling blocks for astrology blogs because astrology blogging is such a small niche. You have to work at it to build any numbers at all.