SEO tips: Britney Spears gets naked, or how to get Googled

You might have found this blog by searching for journalism. You might have been brought here by my observations on politics, multimedia, the law, public relations or the European Union. But statistically, you probably found it looking for a Lamborghini.

Click me baby one more time: search engines love Spears

That’s right. Despite the hours that have gone into carefully crafted blog posts on everything from Andrew Marr to marmosets, the vehicle most likely to bring traffic to my blog is the Lamborghini Gallardo. I unwittingly parked one in a post about celebrity blogging in December, and since then around 800 visitors to my site got here as a result of searching for the supercar. In second place in the search statistics comes Lucinda Ledgerwood from The Apprentice, and taking a feeble third place is my own name.

Now that search engines are big business, getting Googled is no longer as simple as making sure who, what, why, where and when appear in the first paragraph of your story (which most journalists do when they tell a story over the dinner table anyway). When it comes to search results, here are a few tips for coming top:

• Step 1: Think like a searcher, not a sub-editor. If you’re logging on to Lycos to find out what Ashley Cole has got into trouble for this week, you’re not going to tap in any of The Sun’s latest Cole puns, no matter how catchy they may be. Make a list of all the words related to your story that people might actually search for, and cram as many of them into your headline as possible: but forget about redundant words like “he”, “I” or “the”.

• Step 2: Include abbreviations and acronyms in your headlines instead of fully fledged titles. According to Google Insights, searchers are six times more likely to look for “TFL” than “Transport for London”, and “NFL” wipes the floor with “National Football League”.

• Step 3: Turn to your thesaurus. Think of synonyms for your keywords and run them through Google Insights to find the lingo that search engines will love. “Movie” is almost twice as popular as “film”, but “holiday” will easily beat “vacation”.

• Step 4: Once you’ve compiled all your keywords, find popular related terms and phrases with Wordtracker. People searching for “SEO” are also including words like “tools”, “tips” and “services”. If they’re relevant to your article, throw them in to increase your traffic.

• Step 5: Include common misspellings. If you’re anything like me, this will go against every grain in your pedantic body, but the mighty SEO has spoken: Google Insights reveals that “David Beckam” is one of the most popular search terms related to “David Beckham”.

• Step 6: Optimise your images. Search engines are a bit like your blind old aunt who wants to know everything that’s happening but just can’t see, so they need you to painstakingly spell things out. Make sure the image’s caption, filename and alt text all contain key search terms.

• Step 7: Finally, make sure Google can hear you scream by positioning all of your keywords to good effect. Your super SEO headline should appear in your page’s <title> tag and within a <h> heading tag. Make sure these two co-ordinate with what’s in the body of your text to increase your relevance to search engines.

Of course, if I was taking my own advice, I might have titled this “tools and tips for SEO”, or “how to improve your Google ranking”. But according to Google Insights, the above headline will bring more of you here… even if you may not find exactly what you’re looking for.