How to Prime Search Engines with your Substack Post Titles?

Signal to search engines that your Newsletter post matters.

Photo by Merakist on Unsplash

Hey Everyone,

There is an SEO practice I do almost instinctively and I’d like to share it with you all.

A few hours after a Newsletter goes out, your titles have already been indexed/crawled, but you can still type the Title in various search engines to give them a boost.

1. Copy the title of your article, and past it in search Engines.

2. If it doesn’t come up yet, add the + Substack

3. If it doesn’t show up yet, wait and repeat.

4. If it does show up, click on the link. Do this on PC web and mobile.

5. Always link your article on Reddit, to give it added real human discovery.

What Search Engines to Prime?

So here are the Search Engines I like to cover.

1. Google U.S.

2. Google India

3. Bing

4. Duckduck

5. You.com

6. Perplexity

7. Neeva

8. Yahoo

9. Yandex

10. Reddit

11. Youtube

12. Twitter

13. LinkedIn

14. TikTok

15. Facebook

16. Baidu

17. Toutiao

Or on any other site where your work gets traffic that has a search.

What I think this Does

• Gives them slightly better start

• Increases chances of them appearing in Google News and news aggregators like Artifact

• Gives them some human signal that someone is really looking for that exact match topic.

• The more you do this, the more you are learning also about what ranks and what sorts of keywords you are competing against/sources and so forth.

• I consider this very basic marketing SEO homework each time I hit publish, the day of.

• This is also you strengthening the domain name authority of Substack as a community member.

• SEO is a long-game but so is Newsletter development, it’s a marathon and being attentive to these sorts of details can help in the long-run.

• Especially if it’s a free article you want as much exposure as possible, including the number of shares on your article which on Substack is the most important metric for a post’s success that week.

• If it does especially well, you can break down the post into a Twitter thread or share it on Notes and BlueSky.

• Suffice to say that you want to be doing this for your Newsletter title often and see how different search engines are handling the authority of your personal brand.

• You want to signal to the Search engines (who are like distributors) that your content has authority, which it will slowly develop over time.

Thanks for reading!