Now that Google is being kinder to our Storynory site, I feel freer to pontificate about some SEO tips which I hope will give some insight.

The information lower down this post comes from Google’s very useful Sitemaps service which I use in conjunction with the Wordpress Sitemaps plugin. It shows the average top position for our site in certain search queries.

The results aren’t bad for a young site that gives away “free audio stories for kids.” You will notice that our top search queries tend to include those words, or synonyms such as “children” for “kids”. This is because the words are included in the title of the weblog which appears at the top of the browser. As the site is run on Wordpress, I simply typed the key title words in under options / weblog title.

We do better on “story” than we do on “stories” because “story” is part of our URL (Storynory).

In order of importance, I think Google looks at URL, Title, Description, Content. In other words, it’s pretty important to think of SEO when you set up a URL (take cheapflights.com for instance), which has done enormously well out of having a URL that says exactly what it provides, and happens to be a frequent search query on google.

Incidentally, there’s another UK company that is using blogrelations in its URL, clearly in an attempt to usurp our rightful position with that search.

Of course, in real life, you can’t usually choose the URL you would like. But there’s nothing to stop you changing the title tag what whatever you wish.

Top Search Queries Average Top Position

children story 10

audio stories 10

free stories 51

history of soccer 18

free audio books 34

story for kids 9

adam and eve 55

free audio stories 3

storynory 1

bear in a kids tale 5

free children stories 8

story for children 7

children storys 7

s stories 6

one tin solider 7

childrens storys 9

free children’s stories 9

kissa 19

children’s stories 26

free children 9