Successful Blog

SEO-Title and Description Tags

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Practical SEO for Every Blogger

At the top of the list and the top of your template are your blog title and the description of what it’s about. Here’s how to write ’em and how to tag ’em.

Title Tags

Call It What It Is. Snappy titles are fun and clever, but they often don’t communicate. If you choose to go that route, know that you’re asking people and search engines to process more. Music Marketing Blog might not sound exciting, but it communicates more clearly and more quickly than Razza-Jazza ever could. If you’re set on a funky title, consider a subtitle. Always make your description explicitly clear and straightforward.

On my writing blog I have a nondescript title, Letting me be . . . random wandering and philosophy with a subtitle, Storytelling that Makes Memories, on the blog to explain it. Eric’s title includes a subtitle–a phrase with three keywords: free, blog, and promotion. (He’s recently edited it to better reflect his blog content. The keywords now are funny, blog, promotion.)

How do you write that?

  • Keep the title short and clear.
  • Include keywords.
  • If you go Eric’s route–space 2 colons space–know that a direct hit listing will show that way.

How do you tag that?

Here’s how it looks for Eric’s blog.
< head >
<title> Teh Blogfather :: Free Blog Promotion </title>

Which in Google looks like this.

TBF SE Listing

Description Tags

Keep It Short and On Target. The description tag is the <meta> tag that we all agree still has use. I use mine as dual promotion–not only as search engine data, but also to entice readers to visit once the listing does come up. My description tag is packed with keywords that are relevant–words that people look for, words that reflect themes that I write about. The description evolves over time. I tighten it, true it up about every six weeks.

How do you write that?

  • Keep it short, tight, and accurate.
  • Use keywords to describe your blog.
  • Tell readers what to expect.
  • Be sure you can deliver on what you promise here.

How do you tag that?

Here’s how it looks for Liz’s blog.
< head >
<title> Letting me be . . . </title>
< meta name=”description” content=”ME Strauss skews the world slightly wondering about crayons, conformity, feelings, friends, idiosyncrasies, imagination, heroes, yo-yos, and that person reading the paper at Starbucks. Take a second to let yourself be.” />

Which in Google looks like this.

Title tags and description tags–two tags at the top of your template–keep them relevant, accurate, and attractive to your readers. They are your blog’s name and personality. They’re the first things that people know about your blog.

ME “Liz” Strauss, Eric Mutta

7 1/2 Googlicious Steps to BAAAD SEO

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Not to be outdone by Successful Blog or by Lifehacker, our friend and colleague, liberal cowboy next door at jackofallblogs released his own list of 7 1/2 Steps to a Googilicious Website, and I have to give his post a 10.

I’ll translate his 7 1/2 steps for you here and you can read them in his own fine prose over at his blog. Please note that these are tips for websites, not necessarily for blogs.

  • 1. Get a domain name. Google doesn’t like subdomains names.
  • 2. Use a content management system to keep the code clean.
  • 3. Write original content and lots of it.
  • 4. Careful how you use the “more–>” feature if you have one. It doubles page your page views, but require you optimize your pages as two.
  • 5. Write titles that attract attention.
  • 6. Link to your own documents.
  • 7. Get other folks to link to your documents too.

and the last is one I never knew

  • 71/2. The cowboy says he’s not a genius.

Darn, why didn’t I think of that one?

ME “Liz” Strauss

A Side Note–

PS–To all my new friends who visit here from the one link to this page.

Though I’ve made my share of mistakes–they’re on the meta-tags page–this page always was a JOKE. It’s a take off on another post. I see now that it’s dangerous to joke about SEO. Sorry about that.

Meanwhile, the nachos, Jack Daniels, and refreshments are in the sidebar under the ads. Pull up a chair and stick around as long as you want. We like people here.

🙂 –Liz

SEO Optimizing Blogs

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Practical SEO for Every Blogger

It didn’t seem like a good idea to trust my instincts and pure research on a topic like SEO. I’m just not qualified to sort the information, into the good, the bad, and the ugly. I didn’t trust myself to tell which parts of a documents written in 2002 are still valid and which are way out of date.

Lucky for me a programmer and all-around good-guy, Eric Mutta, came to the rescue. He agreed to work with me on this series to make sure that I got the facts straight and to fill in the details that I was missing. Let’s let Eric have a word.

Eric, Tell us something about yourself and your experience with SEO.

My name’s Eric Mutta, though I am known online by some of my many alter egos, the most popular one being Teh Blogfather. I’ve been blogging for nearly a year now on topics in writing, computer programming and recently, just plain comedy.

I approach SEO from the perspective of a computer programmer researching search engine technologies, as well as from that of a blogger who’s trying to rank highly in the popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

As a programmer I could tell you the mechanics behind search engines in general. As a blogger trying to make the top ranks, I could tell you about some techniques I’ve been using that have worked well.

Eric, what is SEO and why do people care about it?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. That’s a bit of a misnomer, because SEO from the perspective of bloggers is not about optimizing search engines, but about optimizing blogs for search engines. . . .

Optimizing search engines would be equivalent to asking “how can I make Google produce better results?” Optimizing our blogs for search engines is equivalent to asking “How can I make my blog rank highly in the search results when a user types in a particular keyword or phrase?” The former is practically rocket science and Google’s rich because they cracked it. The latter is not rocket science and is something you and I can do by following some simple but effective tips.

SEO is important because when you rank well in search engines, more visitors can find your blog, visitors who can be converted to full-time readers.

Where would you tell bloggers to invest their SEO time?

HTML <title></title> Tags. The text you use for your page and post titles is one of the most important things in SEO. Search engines place a lot of importance in titles. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger talks about in his article The Importance of Title Tags in Search Engine Optimization.

<META> Tags. These tags contain information that is invisible to the user but used by all sorts of internet software, with search engines being the software of interest here. HTML tags are used for various purposes including describing your site, specifying keywords for your content, and copyright notices. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch.com explains it well in How Search Engines Rank Web Pages.

Content content content. People always say content is king and they are right, but they should in fact say targeted or relevant content is king. Search engines only go looking for what people want. If you don’t have that, they become blind to whatever content you have. In other words, blog on material that people search for frequently. Look at all the top blogs and you’ll see them doing this (e.g they cover politics, gadgets, celebrity gossip and even shoes in the case of the Manolo of Shoeblogs.com.

Thanks Eric!

Title tags, I’m still shaking. We’ll actually lay out some code you can copy and adapt in tomorrow’s piece. In the meantime you might also explore . . .

Search Engine Optimization Definition

UPDATE: SEE Yaro on Metatags and Keywords
deep dark blue strip A

ME “Liz” Strauss, Eric Mutta

SEO: If Everyone Is Number One

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Practical SEO for Every Blogger

. . . People are giving out advice about ranking in Search engines, when they clearly know nothing whatsoever of the topic.

Worse, in extreme cases . . . they’re giving out information that is patently false, and could actually get bloggers into trouble with some engines. . . .

There are no quick fixes.

–Nick Wilson, Performancing, Misinformation on Search in the Blogosphere

I’ve been in and out of websites and blogs, following links on SEO from every search engine. I know I can spell SEO. I know a few other things too. There are people on the web who know much, much more. There are some who don’t, but say they do. There are a few who will propose that the metaphor in this photograph is real.

SEO in stone

This picture of Search Engine Optimization is a fantasy. I know. I made it. The only thing concrete about SEO is that the rules are always changing. This can be frustrating, but it’s very much worth supporting.

The alternative is that everyone knows the algorithms that search engines use to build their indexes and how each engine values criteria such as link popularity and themes. We really shouldn’t want to know everything. That would be wrong, as wrong as burning books is. Think about it. One of two things would happen.

    1. We would spend more time talking about search engines and even less time talking about readers and quality content. The conversation would become “how to fit the algorithms–how to pass the test.” More time spent discussing the test is less time spent on content. If the rules were available, we’d have no choice but to follow them. Ignore what everyone knows, and we fall off the listings. Suddenly search engines would be controlling everything we said. That’s if the system stood.

    2. The current information access system would completely fall apart. What happens when everyone is number one? No one is. Users would be left with thousands, millions of choices all ranked equally authorative and relevant–a universe of information with no indexing system. It hurts to think about it.

Eric Mutta and I are structuring this series with an eye toward what we really need to know as bloggers and what we can let go of. We’re looking for Optimum SEO that will keep the bulk of our time for attending to our readers and the content they deserve.

We’ll talk through the available resources and how things work. We’ll share plenty of information and places to get more. In other words, this will be Practical SEO for Every Blogger. Don’t be surprised if we all become better search engine users by the end of the series.

And if I meet someone claiming an SEO answer that is set in stone, I will say most graciously, I prefer mine etched in ice.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

SEO Basics for Everyone Starts Monday

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What’s Coming?
This weekend while you while away your time in more timely things, I’ll be seeing my way to SEO files. That’s right. I’m on a QUEST!

SEO Basics for Everyone starts Monday and lasts until we’re done.

Successful Blog will be crawling SEO like the itsy bitsy up that waterspout. I’ve invited programmer, Eric Mutta, to “tag along” to write, code, and explain anything that’s beyond my expertise. So we’ll have the perfect pairing of the new guy (me) and the whizkid (him).

The next interview in two weeks should perk your interest as well. Prepare your coffee early because we’ll soon be talking to the team from The Business Logs.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

SEO-OSE-SOE–When an Alternate Spelling Is Optimization

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SEO misspelling article link search image

When I do a link search on MSN for my personal blog, I always get that starred question Were you looking for . . . ? The same thing happens on Google, Yahoo, and most search engines.

I find it useful when I mistype a word, fun to follow when I’m on a link search, and funny when it’s unconnected to what I’m searching for. I didn’t think much about it, except to notice the number of listings under misspelled words.

In an October post written by Jamsi at Workboxers, The Overlooked Optimization Technique, Jamsi tells how with the Overture Keyword Tool, he used an alternative spelling as Search Engine Optimization. By removing a space and a capital letter from a keyword, Jamsi achieved a top three rank in the listings at Google, Yahoo, and MSN for an obscure blog.

The logic is simple and compelling.

It’s the big fish in a small pond strategy. Choose the less preferred spelling, and you’ll get more attention. Use the Overture Keyword Tool to make sure that you still have an audience. Then tag your post with keywords that will get you a higher rank in a shorter listing.

–ME “Liz” Strauss aka My Lis Straus