This Foodie is Joining BC Bloggers!

In between blog postings and YouTube watching, I have this habit of refreshing the Blogger dashboard to check if any of the blogs I follow have already posted something new. When I finished writing a post for my travel blog, Where My Feet Took Me, one of the blogs I follow posted something new that made me click and read what it's all about. Well, it's about the BC Bloggers meme, and I for one, have seen this one back then, but I wasn't able to join it, and now that it's back, I told myself this foodie just has to join. I have five blogs to update as much as I can, but I am choosing to do this meme here because the meme is scheduled every Mondays, and since I often schedule my post for Mondays here, that day is basically left vacant.

Anyway, there was a question that needed to be answered:

"What is one tool, tip, secret (or whatever it may be)

that you have discovered that has helped you in your blogging

and would like to share to others?"

I have been blogging for half a decade already, but I still don't consider myself popular. Personally, I still am on the quest of learning blogging tricks and tips that could help me get more visitors, but... if there's one tip that I could share, it would have to be about the blog titles.

As much as you have to put in good content - where readers can get information and knowledge to serve whatever purposes, you also have to give it a good title. Providing tags and labels can help, but one thing a friend told me was that I should provide my posts with titles to make it easy for my posts to be part of the "first page search list." This particular tip is something I am doing since I learned it, and so far it has been giving me good results.

So, how does it work? If you're on Blogger, indicate words about your post that you think people will key in when they search. For example, if I am writing about a food trip in Intramuros, I could put in my title as "Where to Eat in Intramuros" or, if I am writing about a specific restaurant, I could title it as "Particular Restaurant Intramuros Manila." Be careful, though, as Blogger only allows certain amount of characters, so keep it short, simple, yet powerful. Publish the post like that, and hit the back button and change the title to something you want to title it, like "A Historic Gastronomic Adventure in the Walled City." Even if you hit the publish post button, you will notice that the first title you typed in is still the permalink of the post. This adds you another step in the blogging process, but if it will make your posts a whole lot better in the search rankings, then I guess the effort is not wasted.

If you're on WordPress, just select the correct format how to title your posts (I am not on WordPress anymore, so I don't know now how this is specifically done), and if you notice that your posts' pemalinks are showing "www.yourblogtitle.whatever/?p=whatever number" at the end, you really should change how you publish the posts.

Of course, this is just one of the oh so many tips I have learned and I still have to learn. With every tip one can acquire, I guess the most important thing when you blog is the content of the post, so work on the content first and the rest will just follow.

This week's BC Bloggers prompt is brought to you by:

Paula's Place | Wahm sa Pinas | Happy Thoughts
Dadedidodu | Handy Views | Chromatic Note

*** Jenn ***