For example of how the crawling process works in practice, it helps to work with a sample text.  Let’s consider this paragraph:

If you have a winning way with words, you may be interested in learning more about direct mail copywriting.  The field offers powerful writers the opportunity to be free of geographical constraints, to earn passive income, and to pay their bills without having to work a boring nine-to-five job.

In short, direct mail copywriting is a very tempting career option for many writers.

Now, while it is true that you can make a very good living with direct mail copywriting, not every one who enters the field is going to be able to do it full time.

Clients do not come crawling out of the woodwork and run straight for your door.

The successful copywriter has to attract new clients, maintain existing relationships, and consistently deliver copy that converts.

What are some of the words used in this paragraph more than once?

Maybe you chose copywriting, writers, and direct mail.

The web bots would do the same thing on a larger scale.  Thus, if you were looking for information about dog food, and typed “dog food store” into Google, this article would not appear in the search results, because the bots would not consider it relevant.

The phrase ‘dog food store’ does not appear once in the sample text, so the bots would skip over this article when pulling up choices for the search results.

On the other hand, if you were looking for writers for an ad campaign and typed “direct mail copywriter” this article might appear on the first page of your search results.

It used your search words, also known as your “keywords” multiple times, prompting the bots to match you with an article where your desired words appeared more than once.

SEO simply means improving the volume and quality of your traffic by making your site appear more often in web searches for your niche.

Some carry this a little further and claim that SEO means getting your website onto the first page of the Google search results for your niche.

This is desirable because the closer to the top of the list your blog appears, the more people are likely to click through to your site.

This is talked about in web circles as your search ranking, and the whole point is to improve your search ranking by optimizing your content for web search.

To optimize your blog for the web, you need to learn how content is sorted for the web.  Each of the major search engines has a program known as a “bot” or “web crawler” that continuously reviews everything that is posted on the web.

These bots look for the words and phrases used on a page and sort the content according to the words it contains, in a concept loosely defined as “relevance”.

Now that you understand the basics of finding content for your blog, it is time to focus on getting readers for your blog.

Remember, just because a blog is created doesn’t mean anyone reads it.  You need to be sure that people are finding your blog whenever they search for content in your niche.

This can be done by optimizing your blog for the web and attaching keywords to your blog posts.

Now, the whole concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gets a lot of press, but few people really understand how it works.

This is because it seems to be pretty complicated.  Or at least the way it is described makes it seem pretty complicated.  However, all a regular blogger needs to know is how to get noticed.

You can learn how to get noticed by increasing your understanding of how SEO works.

to be continued:

If you have other friends out in the blogosphere, or offline friend who know a lot about your niche, you can also get time efficiencies by having them create posts for you.

Guest columnists and guest bloggers are fun for both you and your readers.  It can add variety of perspective, help build the community, and save you valuable time while still providing high quality unique content to your blog.

So as you continue to grow with your blog, bring your content management to the forefront while you find the right balance of original and “borrowed” materials.

Finding a balance between your online and offline life will impact what gets created for the blog.  Thoughtful planning can make finding this balance rewarding and entertaining for both you and your readership.

Happy Canada Day

Consider how much time it takes you to create a single blog post from scratch.

If it takes you two hours to create a quality post for your blog, and you have six hours to give to your blog each week, then you can create three posts per week.

If you would like to have a more updates per week, then you perhaps need to create two unique posts per week, and use your other blog time to find articles from the directories like GetArticleNow and do headline commentary.