There, I’ve admitted it. I love it when google searches pull up my website. When I first began my nursing blog I wrote a post about a liver failure patient and I included the phrase “lactulose enema.” A while after the post was out I was exploring my blog stats and learned that if you google the phrase “lactulose enema,” pixelrn.com comes up on the first page! Whoo hoo! I kick ass, baby! (Unfortunately I’ve also learned that the nurse + enema keyword combo will put you into some pretty seedy porn searches.)

Here’s some of my favorite keyword searches that have turned up pixelrn.com on the first page: (according to my statcounter)

“the things about a good nurse”
why, of course that should point directly to pixelRN…

“how realistic is the tv show House?”
I still watch the show House religiously even though I’ve criticized it for its unrealistic portrayal of nurses. I can’t help it. House is addicting. He’s such a curmudgeonly old bastard. BTW, Anyone see the Scrubs episode this season where they spoof House? Excellent work.

“how much time could live without liver”
Yikes. Umm, hate to be the bearer of bad news but…
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Now here’s where things start to get a little dicey:

“cardioversion”
and
“how to bag a patient who has pulled out his tracheostomy”

I’ve noticed tons of people googling the phrase “cardioversion” and coming across this post. The latter phrase will point you to this post. It makes me a little nervous that people might actually be looking to my blog for relevant clinical information. Did I give out the right information? Is it accurate? As nurse bloggers we should be aware of the responsibility that entails. As nurses we have to be careful about what we publish, knowing that people might be looking for our expertise. To address this issue, I recently came across the Health on the Net Foundation They have set up a code of conduct applicable to all medical bloggers you can even apply your blog for accreditation.

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And I’ll leave you with a very recent search…

“sugar free peeps”
Someone even took this search a step further by finding my post and then referring to it on a blog at chow.com, a foodie website.

So nurse bloggers, what’s the take-home here? For starters, if you have any interest in promoting your blog, be keen about the keywords you use. They can bring a wider audience to your blog. Web crawlers particularly look at keywords in the titles of your posts, so choose them wisely. (Notice how many I snuck into the title of this post?)

Finally, if you want to increase your google searchability for the keywords “nurse blogs,” find a way to incorporate those two words into your blog’s title. I recently asked Shane to change my blog title from “PixelRN” to “Nurse + Blog = PixelRN” and I subsequently moved up from page 9 to page 2 on the google search for “nurse blogs“.

(maybe with all the times I’ve mentioned nurse and blog in this post I can actually get to page one. hee hee.)

So who is number one on a google keyword search for nurse blogs? None other than Geena from Codeblog: Tales of a Nurse. A well deserved position I might add, as she is one of the original nurse bloggers and one of the first nurses to participate in Grand Rounds, the weekly medical blog carnival. And it looks like Geena is going to be hosting the next Change of Shift on March 22th. Way to go Geena!