The Order Google Crawls Your Page: Common Mistakes Bloggers Make

Excerpt from Grizzly's post "Common Mistakes Bloggers Make: Part 1":

Your blog title is the primary keyword(s) used by the search engines in deciding what your blog is about. Next in importance is your blog description and then comes your post title and finally your header titles.

If available you should also try and include your main keyword in your URL as well or some variation of it.

The bots that crawl your pages start at the top left corner and work down to the bottom right. Do not put anything irrelevant in the top left portion of your page as this is what is used to categorize your page for both indexing and adsense ads.

Google will index your page using your blog title followed by the first line of html text it sees. Make sure the first line of text is your page title. Make sure your page title contains the keyword you are trying to get traffic for. Make sure your page title is alluring enough to get people to visit as this is what they are presented in the SERP's. (Search Engine Results Pages) This may seem obvious to you but I have critiqued a number of blogs lately that have started their posts with sentences like "Thank you for coming to my site" or "Welcome to my blog" or "Part 2 in my continuing journey online". This is what gets indexed and people searching on the engines are not likely to click on these sites as they won't have a clue as to what these sites are about.

Your page Title and post title specifically is what Google uses to send you relevant adsense ads. If your blog is about cats and you use a post title like "Why dogs suck and cats don't" you will get ads for dogs, cats and pets in general. If your readers are cat lovers you won't get the best ads. The more you optimize your post title and post content the more Google optimizes the ads it sends you.

Let's say you start a blog called "Cats" and your first post is titled "Why I love Cats". Wonderful. Your post rambles on about all the reasons you love cats. So far you have told Google exactly what your blog is about and that your post is most likely about four legged cute little furry hairballs and not about a Broadway musical. You will get indexed for cats. You might get some traffic but not much. You will get adsense ads for cat related products... perhaps even for tickets to a musical. The problem is that your ads will be low paying and your traffic will be browsers - people out for a sunday drive. Why? You are far too general in content and this is not how to attract readers or how to get the best paying adsense ads.

You can use the blog title "Cats" but your post title must zero in on something specific about cats and then your post should expand on this theme. Try "Common Cat Diseases and Treatments" or "How to Maintain a Healthy Cat". By doing this you will draw a targeted audience and moreover you will get better targeted ads... ads that pay more and are more likely to be clicked on. Most marketers don't realize that Google rewards good quality sites with the best ads and sends low paying ads to poor content sites.

Setup your blog so that only one post shows per page. Your home page gets the bulk of your traffic. This is true for everyone and it tends to have the highest page rank. Bloggers tend to post several posts on their home pages usually in snippet form with a link to the full article on a separate page. The majority of ads clicked are on the home page and not on secondary pages. People reading further into your blog have found what they are looking for and aren't clicking on ads. People on your homepage have not found what they want and click your ads in hopes of better luck elsewhere. Blogs that use several posts on their homepage aren't optimized for adsense - too many subjects and post titles - the content is varied because the page contains several different subjects and the Google bot doesn't know what the page is about specifically. The end result is that the page will receive general ads based on the overall content of the blog and this means low paying ads.

I only post one article per page including the home page. Each page is optimized around one subject and Google sends me the most relevant ads which also pay the most. I don't get as many page views as regular bloggers but I do make more money from adsense.