Why Meta Description Tags in a Blog Can Hurt your Socialness

We just answered how to add a meta description tag to your Blogger blog template because someone asked this SEO question over at Collective-E.

However. Inserting a meta tag into your blog may not be the best idea.

Long ago, Meta Description tags stopped having any impact on how your site is ranked in Google search results (for a definition of the meta description tag with pictures, click here). This may not be the case for other search engines like Yahoo, but it is for Google (as of this post publication). However. Google may display the meta description tag in search results, and social outlets like Facebook will display them as well (as of this post publication...websites are always changing how they work). Here are Google's words stating that meta description tags won't affect your rankings. They do, however, still display them when it's a good fit.

So. Just when you thought "Great! One less thing to worry about!", you could argue: "Hey wait: Google can pick up and display a meta description tag, and so can Facebook, so I'll use it by creating some great marketing copy that reflects my overall website or blog."

This is the angle I usually take. However, this is not the case when it comes to blog posts. Recently, I "shared a link" on Facebook, which means that I posted a link to my Facebook profile, which then signaled to all of my friends there that I had posted a link. Not only does Facebook let me post a link, but it will display a photo if I so choose. The link that I wanted to share was just a silly one: I had just gotten my hair colored brown and blond, and had put it into a ponytail, and it had split itself into the two colors, and it looked interesting. I didn't color one side brown and the other side blond, as it's all blended when styled normally, but the ponytail was visually interesting, so I shared it with my friends.

Now. To be a good little SEO person, I had just recently installed the code to show a meta description tag on my blog template. Years have gone by, and I have never done this. So I did it a few weeks ago. I was in a rush, so the only thing I put in was "girly stuff", which of course has almost no use SEO-wise at all, but was a descriptive start at what you could find at my blog, FashionMista.

I have shared many links via Facebook, and always knew that Facebook automatically pulled the blog post title, the first line of my content on my blog, and a picture. The pulled content did the job, and I never had to make a "Comment" about my own post to explain what was going on.

Until now. Because I had altered my meta description tag, which said only: "girly stuff", when I went to post the link, Facebook showed everyone this:


The blue content, "FashionMista: Look at the Two Tone" is the blog post title. Since "girly stuff" is meta description tag, and hence the content that Facebook automatically displayed, it doesn't explain much about the hair. If this had been a normal article (aka not about a picture), the user would not be very inclined to click on my link, or at least let me explain the style. In fact, nobody did click on the link, which would have explained the style. They only commented based on their reactions to the picture. My mother in particular, was not pleased. She thought I colored one side brown, and the other blond, and looked like that every day. She almost went into shock and I did consider "unfriending" her to temper any social networking damage control.

Right away, I removed the meta description code from my blog template. I waited a day for this to absorb on the internets, and posted a new blog post with a new photo. This is how the new link has shown (with my boring hair style):



You see the blog post title: "FashionMista: Hair in 'Normal' Times of Styling". You see the photo, and you see the first few lines of content.

It is for this reason that I am advising not to fill in the meta description code on your blog. The overall meta description tag, for SEO uses on blogs, are not helpful and should not be used. They are too limiting. Blog posts are so specific to one topic or sliver of a topic, that you do not want that insight to be lost under a blanket statement of what your blog is.

For example: which statement is more effective for this blog post?
Content from the blog: "Who knew a ponytail gone wild could have launched a motherly protest in Facebook. There were honest to goodness revolts going on. Mom threatened to pull out of her highly anticipated trip to NYC, and dad ..."

Meta description tag for entire blog: "FashionMista is a chronicle of a designer who quit her day job to really design, and do a whole lot of other things."

Which do you resonate to? Especially if you were following my stream of link postings on Facebook? The statement that is more direct? Or the statement that is an umbrella term?

If you've noticed a trend in what makes people click on your shared links, do tell.

How to Add the Meta Description Tag in Blogger Blog Templates

If you want to include the Meta description and keyword tags to your blogger based blog template, here is how you can do it.

Note: meta tags aren't that important anymore SEO-wise. However, they may show up when data is pulled from a social media outlet like Facebook, so if you do have something there, make sure it makes sense. BUT: It is not recommended. I did a writeup of why.

If you are still set on adding the meta description tag to your blog, here are the directions. The meta keyword tag will be pretty worthless because it is designed to include a string of words that are found on a specific page. Well, your blog has many pages on it, and if you are making this change at the root level, you only get to put in 1 meta description and 1 set of meta keywords in, which most likely will not include what one of your blog pages is talking about.

Log into your blog.

Click on Layout.

Click on Template and Edit HTML.

Make a copy of your code first. Do this by just Selecting All if it (Edit > Select All) and pasting it into a neutral program like Notepad or Text Edit. Try not to use Word, because that will add yuchy stuff to it without you realizing it.

Once you are looking at the code in your Template, find this line at the top of the code:
b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/

This line is already there. Leave it, don't edit it at all, and place the meta content code beneath it.

The code you will place will be:

meta content='TYPE YOUR DESCRIPTION HERE' name='description'/
meta content='TYPE YOUR KEYWORDS HERE' name='keywords'/

I didn't wrap these lines of code with the <> symbols because if I did, the code would actually kick in, and you wouldn't be able to see it here. So remember to close your code with the <>.

For your keywords, you can just put a string of words and you don't need commas. There is no need to repeat words in there. That won't help ya.

Once you have entered in the code, click to Preview your blog. This is very important. If your blog doesn't show up or looks funnhy, then you added the code incorrectly, and you need to go get the code you copied and pasted from before into Notepad or Text Edit, and start again. Or, just click Cancel and start again.

Good luck!

Do you syndicate your content? You could be weakening your SEO

It's flattering when a website wants to repost your content via a syndicate arrangement. As an early website or blog, you may want to syndicate out your content in an attempt to increase exposure.

As a person with SEO awareness, I've never wanted to syndicate my content because I figured that if my blog had an article, I wanted to build links to it at my blog, thereby strengthening my link power for my blog as a whole, and that post in particular. If I posted my content on another blog or website, and people linked to it, then those links do not help my website. My name gets out there, but really, in the online world, you need to have a heavy hitter website or blog in order to have traffic and influence on the web.

That said. Someone in a forum shared a link with me on Google's approach to duplicate content and syndicated articles. It validated my gut instinct of not giving away content since you are essentially competing against yourself. From Google:

"Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, Google will always show the version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer. However, it is helpful to ensure that each site on which your content is syndicated includes a link back to your original article. You can also ask those who use your syndicated material to block the version on their sites with robots.txt."

If you are going to syndicate, you could and should seek out a link from the website who is reposting your article, and most likely, they will not want to block that content from being indexed because they are using your content to create more content on their own websites - without writing it themselves. Therefore, you could consider compromising by allowing them to publish an abstract of your article, with a link to your website or blog to get the rest of the article. Good luck!

What an Alt Tag/Attribute and Link Love Can Do for a Temporary Home Page

So by the way, I'm starting a new company with two power houses in the women's entrepreneurial world (official announcement to come). And in doing so, we are building a mega website with lots of fun function for promoting your business. The purpose of today's post, however, is to demonstrate how a brand new URL with very little content and a lot of secrecy is already ranking Page 1 #2 of Google for the company name in as little as 6 days (could be less, this is just when I checked) without submitting to any directories or sending any requests to link to other websites.

Step 1: Buy the domain. Duh.

Step 2: While you build the core of your website, put up a temporary home page. But don't put up a giant image with your company logo and text saved in Photoshop or something. Go the extra mile and make the individual images that are not text, like your logo, and create content to go onto your page. Pay the programmer extra to do this for you. It's worth it. Google and other search engines will be able to start crawling what text, links and images you do have on there.

Step 3. If you have images, you have the opportunity to fill in the "alt attribute" sometimes known as the "alt tag". This tells blind people what image is appearing if they can't see it (it's spoken to them). Or if a person has images turned off on their Internet in order to load pages faster (aka not sucking down images), they can read what image would have been there. These alt attributes are considered by Google, so if you can, and if it makes sense to what the image actually is, include your keywords in these alt attributes.

Here is a screenshot of how my search term "collective e" is finding the keywords on the web page:


This picture shows how the search results are displaying the copy on the page. In bold, in the search results, Collective E is displayed. But as you see here in the picture, circled red, Collective-E is an image of a swirly font. Therefore, it is not actual text. To put "alternative" text there, for computers to read, we inserted "Collective E". It is that alt="Collective E" that is seamlessly being displayed in the search results.

Step 4: Find reasons to put links on your temporary home page. Gives search engines more to travel through on your site, and one more reason why you might look like a worthwhile and helpful website.

Step 5: If you have a blog, link to your new website from your blog on your side panel, like I did.

Step 6: Start Tweeting about your new website at Twitter.com to your friends, and include the URL in the tweet. Try to use the actual URL instead of a TinyURL, just for ultimate impact's sake. Google is returning tiny Tweets in its search results, so make sure you're lookin' good!

Step 7: Find a reason to blog about your new company, and include the company name, Collective-E, in the blog post. And link to it (as shown).

You are well on your way to building a solid foundation for a well optimized site. When you do launch, your content will be searched all the quicker by the mack daddy search engines. Just think - you haven't even built the Facebook Page for it yet (a Facebook Page is a public access page that search engines index), or added it as a Company or a Group in LinkedIn!

Great SEO Example of Well Optimized Blog Post for High Ranking in Google

This blog post, a review on Ultimate Van Lines has been written so well, that one week after the author wrote it, she moved from #10 in Google to #2 (well, #2, but #1 is getting two search results as of this post) for the company's name,"ultimate van lines". And this is without any links pointing to it (remember, links are super important in SEO)! And what is #1? The moving company's website. Keep in mind, that the Skimbaco blog is an already established blog, so it has search engine strength behind it. But how did Skimbaco increase her rankings with just her wits and the time spent writing the post?

1. She included the keyword "Ultimate Van Lines" in her post title.

2. She included "Ultimate Van Lines" in her second paragraph, and linked it to their home page.
a. She could have kicked off the article with a linked "Ultimate Van Lines" in order to get these important keywords closer to the beginning of the article, but she didn't. Her intro was more important, which is fine.

b. This particular review is negative. The moving van never showed, and then got canceled in the system because the rep they were working with was accused by higher authority as having quoted them too low. So Ultimate Van Lines just canceled the order with no warning. Skimbaco later discovered that Ultimate Van Lines has a bad habit of stealing people's household belongings and holding them hostage for money, so it's for the best the order got canceled. That said, normally you would not want to link to the company's home page, since that is a form of Link Love. However, Google just wants to know that you are covering every angle of what you're posting about, so Google will consider this link helpful. Therefore, it is good to include it in this type of review.

3. She has repeated "Ultimate Van Lines" many times in the article, but not in an annoying, keyword stuffed way. She has written it in a useful way.

4. She has included links to other websites and reviews for Ultimate Van Lines. It might help her to move these links up higher in the post, but she's doing just fine for now. If her rankings drop for this term, this could be an option.

Can she get even more traffic from this post? Yes. She wrote a review, and people often tack on "review" to whatever they are searching for. This was how I doubled traffic for my series of laser hair removal from American Laser Center. I worked in "review" into the hotspots of the highest ranking post in that series.

To get more traffic, she can insert "review" into her blog title (remember the SEO value of the blog title). Skimbaco is currently ranking 4th in Google for "ultimate van lines review", getting beat by a usual heavy hitter, My3cents.com. but if she keeps this up, she could outrank it! Not to mention if more websites link to this post. Like mine has done. :)

First SEO Class Success! Takeaway: Record your Movements

The first SEO class of Katie James Pixelated was a success! Fifteen women with companies or working for companies attended, and it was held at the boardroom in the lovely In Good Company (with use of their super fun projector to project my laptop).

We covered everything from the 5 top areas of each web page that you must pay attention to if you want effective SEO, to why the 1 random search term that someone used can be your next big traffic hit, and should not be ignored. My trusty strategy partner Melissa took notes on our official dry erase board so that we can design more and better classes. Here's who was there: Sara from PopJudaica (hip Jewish t-shirts and gifts), Robyn from ChiqueLife (women's plus size clothing), Nicole from Lucky for Baby (cute baby cloths boutique), Kathleen from Kathlin Argiro (fab bridal designer), Betty from Betty Newman's Trendspotting (blog of amazing and unique product finds), Judith from ReelInvitations (dvd wedding invitations), Renee, an Intellectual Property Attorney, Kim Do, the New York based wedding and makeup artist, and Jill from Fretzels (chocolate covered pretzels) (who brought us some of her chocolate covered fretzles!! yumm!!)

What I wanted everyone to know about SEO, so that you can get control of it and feel like you are confidently steering a ship in sea of swelling competition, is to keep track of what you do. This can be done in the simplest of Excel documents. This way, when you are looking in your Google Analytics, or some other stat program, you can know what happened at the same time of a spike in traffic earlier in the month, or why your traffic for a certain keyword has started to decline (goodness forbid).

Here are the columns that I use to keep dated track of things:
Date , Detail of Change, Page Changed, Notes ,Results

When you put this in Excel, you can look down the list to easily find the date, then quickly see what you did. Here are some sample data entries I entered that have helped explain traffic spikes:

ThatITGirl
6/21/08 | Emailed Katja at @skimbaco that I posted about her shirt
6/22/08 | @skimbaco tweeted "don't bug me" post | Got X number of hits

www.katie-james.com
8/24/06 | Posted 1st desktop art design to Sumbleupon at night | Got 200 hits
4/9/08 | Put up newsletter signup in side column. | No signups. Still dry. :(
4/20/08 | Put up new design of newsletter signup. | Signups!! Dryspell over!
5/08/08 | Sent Mothers Day email to newsletter subscribers. Subject line had "shipping coupon" in it. | No sales. However, higher open rate than usual. ChicagoTribune.com featured dog treat bag with mysteriously same copy I wrote in the newsletter. Hmm...Must have a subscriber at Tribune!

Because I do this for my own sites (shopping cart site + 2 blogs), as well as those of clients, I keep these changes on Worksheets on the same Excel document. That way, I don't have tons of documents floating around. But this is my personal organization style that might not work for you.

Just remember: Be mindful of changes you make to your website, so that if you do something good, you can repeat it, and if you do something bad, you can try to revert back to how it was and stop the bleeding!

Blog Post and Page Titles are Super Important for Increasing Traffic

This tip is an easy one, and we've covered it before: Page Titles are Super Important. I just changed a few little words in one of my blog posts titles, and it moved from page 1 #6 in google to page 1 #2 in google in one week.

This is a great way to try and increase your traffic by little numbers at a time. If you pay attention to your stats, to your comments, to what your readers are saying, you will see how you can change particular blog post titles and double your traffic to that page. If you are getting 10 hits to a post page per month, you could get 20. If you did this to 10 posts, that's 100 extra very relevant hits per month. I measure this for big and little websites - from one that has tens of thousands of users a month, to my own little blog (FashionMista), which is what I'm about to share. On a larger website, you can change your targeted keyword on one page to a better one that you found by doing your keyword research (try Keyword Discovery) and pick up 4,000 per month, up from 1,000. BUT, you could also have the reverse effect, and change what isn't broke, and start to slide down. So always do your research.

Here's what happened for my little blog: I am getting laser hair removal done on my legs, and am blogging about it. The intent (and thus my target keyword) was to blog about "laser hair removal". Therefore, I had that term in all blog post titles, in links where possible, and in any pictures (alt attribute). What I did not intend was to become a voice for/against American Laser Center (ALC), which is where I'm getting it done. But, that is what has happened. My blog posts naturally optimized for "american laser center review". Why? Because some other review type websites linked to my main page, people commented with those words, and I said "american laser center" a lot.

The other day, I got a comment on my main laser landing page from a girl who said something like: "I know this post was done in 2005, but it still comes up number 1 for a search on american laser center reviews, so I'll post a comment to warn..." Unhappy ALC people seem to find my blog, and comment about it. Which is fine. But anyway, I hadn't been following my ratings for this term, and sure enough, I was #1 for "american laser center reviews". I was #6 for the singular version (review). But I wanted to be higher. :) What's an SEO girl to do? Change the post title.

My blog post title was: "Laser Hair Removal: I Got Lasered". I liked it because it seemed compelling, and suggests journal entries. But, after learning that I was #1 for "reviews", and #6 for "review", and wanting to rule in both terms, I changed the title to: Laser Hair Removal: My Experiences and Reviews at American Laser Center."

That's it. I also edited the laser article to make it more current, explain that I was still getting the treatments, and made sure to include the word "review" in more places.

The result? Doubled traffic in one week.

Pay attention. You are your own gold mine. :)

ps: Here is my article on a blog post title with pictures

pps: Rankings mentioned here are subject to change at any time...

Google Images: an Easy Source of Traffic for SEO

I was doing a stat report for a website, and have always known that Google Images can send a good amount of traffic, but it always helps to look at the numbers: for the year, Google Images had sent 27,5000 visits to this website, which was a small percentage of their overall traffic sources, but that's 27,500 visits just from including images in a blog post or website page.

A quick and easy way to bring in traffic from Google: use images in your web posts or pages, set their alt attributes, and link them to something if possible. This might get your image, and your website, found in Google Images. What does that mean? It means that if you are going to blog about something, include a picture, fill in its alt attribute, and write your post with your keyword phrases woven in. Let's break down this image recommendation:

1. You want to blog about the super cute rolling shoes that kids roll around on, but you want them for adults. You will create a "post" about this (aka web page, but if it's in blogging software, it's sometimes called a blog post), titling the post something like "Super Cute Heely Roller Shoes for Adults". I did not keyword research that, and guessed, but I do know from my own website stats that "heely roller shoe" is a searched for term.

2. You need a picture of a heely roller shoe. If you are not blogging on your own products, and you need to find the image, especially if it's a product, go to Amazon.com. Do a search for the shoe, right click on the image you want (Mac users: hold down your "ctrl" key next to the space bar and then click), and select Save to Desktop, or something similar. This sucks the image down onto your computer. Most likely, the file name is something like 2349875thiefuodjrw8.jpg, which makes no sense. Rename it to heely-roller-shoe-pink.jpg. This may or may not help in search engines rankings, but it can't hurt. Now you can upload it via your blogging software (Blogger lets you do this, or Flickr) or upload it to your host. Remember, if you are wanting to use an image from a small company, or a content based organization, you should ask permission and state your use of the image before you do this. It's a good idea to offer to link to that company or organization in your citation. Even with Amazon, it's just polite to link to them if you use their image.

2. You will increase the image's chances of getting listed in the first pages of Google Images for the specific keyword term if you fill in the alt attribute. This was created to help the blind know what the image is, so it's really a descriptive term of what the image is. It will not show up on your live website page. In the code, the alt attribute looks like this: alt="descriptive term here"

If you have to go into the code, vs your CMS or blogging software letting you access it a different way, the code for the image and alt attribute would look like this:
<img src="http://www.fashionmista.com/images/heely-roller-shoe-pink.jpg" alt="pink heely roller shoe">
I only bolded it to show you where it is. It won't be bolded in real life.

3. For your copy, get the actual keyword word as close to the image as possible. Google will read the copy on your page and show the image that is closest to it in Google Images.

That should be it! Pay close attention to your website stats to see what is working and not working, making adjustments all of the time. Good website stat programs are Google Analytics and Statcounter. Google Analytics will keep a history of your stats, but Statcounter will only keep it for 100 hits at a time. Each have their benefits, like how Statcounter gives you real time results in a consice way, whereas you have to wait a day before Google's presents the full results.

Facebook pulls and uses your Meta Description Tag

SEO gurus have been saying that meta description tags aren't worth very much anymore in Google's eyes. Blogger, Google's blogging platform, doesn't even let you put any in. So as a business owner with lots on her plate, one less thing to worry about on the website is almost a blessing. Or is it...

Before I continue, let's review what meta description tags are. You can click here for meta description tags broken down with pictures, but I'll recap. The meta description tag is unique to every page. It describes what is on the page, and definitely uses the keywords you have placed into your content, alt tags in images, linked content, etc. While it might not have very much pull anymore when a search engine is evaluating your page (aka if you don't have one, it won't kill ya), it is used other ways that is important to actual people's eyeballs when they are evaluating your page. You won't see it on the page itself, but it can be displayed in other places, such as in the search engine results (see these pictures for an example).

While the meta description tag might not be a heavy weight on the technical side, it is a heavy weight for a person's eyeballs, which now includes eyeballs in Facebook. When you "Post a Link" in Facebook, or leave a link on someone's "Wall," Facebook will automatically search for and pull available pictures from the webpage. You'll get to choose which image you want displayed. It also grabs the first line of copy from that page and displays it, as a teaser. However, if you have a meta description tag, it displays the content in the meta description tag.

Example: Galia Gichon is giving a financial seminar "Whip Your Finances Into Shape" with the Freelancers Union. I posted it as a link on the Ladies Who Launch Group page in Facebook. The first sentance was pulled: "Baffled by where your money is going? Does retirement seem unreachable? Anxious about uneven income? Tired of living paycheck to paycheck, or
just without a realistic financial plan?" After a quick look at web page's source code, as far as I can tell, there is no meta description tag. So Facebook pulled and displayed the first line of the page.

However, when I answered someone in Facebook about where to find my sexy sleep masks (just got in a new batch!), I gave her the direct link, and my meta description tag was pulled: "Perfect for travel, Saturday morning sleep-ins, and afternoon catnaps. This silk sleep mask is reversible with a lining to block out the light, thanks to the black silk dupioni." If you go to this page, you'll notice that you can't see this text on the page. It's under the hood, in the code. Only search engines and other computer robot things can see it, and then spit it back out when called for.

So, it's just a new light shed on your meta description tag, so that as you write it, you'll have a better idea of who and when it might be read.

And, if you have a website based entirely in Flash, this will not work for you! Flash basically acts like a projector, throwing a website on a screen with no way to pull the little elements from it, like pictures and text. If you want to learn more about Flash based websites, I wrote a whole post about it here.

How a Fancy Pants Flash Website Could Hinder Your Sales

First published for the Ladies Who Launch blog

Your high-concept, artful, playful website could be making you all but invisible in the search engines, nearly impossible for people to send a link to a specific product to their friend, and could negate any positive impact from social bookmarking sites like StyleHive.com. Most of the big designers use these types of sites, and I say more power to 'em. It just means that my little well-optimized website will get more exposure.

To define, a fancy pants website is usually built with a lot of Flash, or another program that animates things to make them extra cool. The website pages sometimes look like pages, but they may not generate their own URLs. Your whole website may run off of www.mywebsite.com. Let's look the super cute shoe company, Seychelles Footwear. Go to that website and play with it. It's very fun. Luckily, it can be fun because they sell all of their shoes through stores and other websites that are much better optimized (aka appealing or readable) for the search engines.

The Link Problem
Years ago, I bought some Seychelles. I was so excited that I blogged about what I bought, and the other cute styles. I wanted to link directly to the shoes I was talking about. On the web, it's best to get to the point as quickly as possible. With Seychelles, no can do. I can only link to their home page and figure out ways to finagle some images from other websites like Zappos.com to show what I'm talking about. In fact, I'd be better off linking to Zappos.com, since my readers could fall in love with the shoe, and buy it right then.

The Search Engine Problem
Search engines love links. Links are like vegetables to them. When a search engine visits your site, it 'crawls' or 'spiders' as much of your website as it can by traveling through all the links you have placed. If you have images linked to images, and no text, or no links that go to places that are forbidden to search engines, they stop and miss out on all of the stuff you can SEE on your site. They like to read things. If you have words that are images, for example, and not actual words, the search engine just sees a file called our_mission.jpg. It has no idea that there are words there.

The Usability Problem
If products are spinning by, it's visually exciting at first, but when you go to click on something, it can be a slippery experience. Making your site as easy to use as possible is a good goal to ensure that your users are happy and seamlessly turn into customers.

The Social Bookmarking Problem
I call this Socialness. Social bookmarking is when a web page gets bookmarked on a website by a person. Other people can see what that person bookmarked, and then visit the page. StyleHive.com has a lot of highly interested users looking for fun things, and they will buy. Your products can show up there (if bookmarked , or 'hived' by someone if that product has its own web page. If every product shows up on www.yourwebsite.com, and not on www.yourwebsite.com/products/398lfoifjlsfjow or something obscure to humans but very important to how the internet works, then you could be missing out on a potentially effective bookmark that could drive highly interested people to your products. Example: Coco Ribbon sells very pretty things on their site, and they just redesigned their website. I must confess, I do miss their old one because, I think, each product had its own URL. So, if I go to put something on StyleHive, StyleHive picks up the product image, price, and description and automatically publishes it on their site. However, with their current setup, pointing out pictures and assigning it to one page is tricky. All of their lingerie items, for example, are under this URL: http://www.cocoribbon.com/collections/lingerie, so I can't link to a direct one, which would get users there quickly, and help that product rank in the search engines. If you don't care about search engines, then this isn't a problem.

The Bottom Line
Using animation and other swirly things is fine. It's great. Just ask yourself, before you fall in love with a concept, where you are using it, and how it will affect your users, who ultimately, can be your biggest evangelists.

Rank Highly with a Blog Post Title in Search Engines

First published on the Ladies Who Launch Blog

EXTRA! EXTRA! BLOG POST TITLES MUST BE SEO JUICY!!

Citizen journalists and industry experts who hope to monetize their blogs have a new challenge as writers/editors with regards to blog post titles. In the old days of print journalism, copywriters worried about how many characters (spaces included) would fit into a space for a great headline that would sell papers and keep readers. Headlines were clever ink prints on a page. On the Internet, however, they are links, cannot be touched with anything but a mouse, and they can make or break your popularity in the search engines. Why? Search engines love them, and people love them. Search engines can reward a blog post title with high rankings, and a person needs to click it to contribute to the traffic to your website or blog.

First of all: What is the blog post title and where do you find it? Read about the title tag with pictures here first.

In the Search Engine Age, however, writers have at least two new challenges:

1. Get the article to even rank highly in search engines, aka being #1 on Google or at least on the first page of search results. Search engines place a lot of ranking value on the page title. On a website, you can usually easily set your page title. On a blog, usually your blog post title doubles as the page title. While considering your blog post as a potential high ranking web page, the search engines pay close attention to what words you use in your blog post title. In the case of this blog post, it is titled: "Rank Highly with a Blog Post Title in Search Engines"

Example: Let's say you article is all about "essie nail polish" and how their new colors are based on candy. If your blog post title is: "Yummy Nails" but the content in that blog post is all about how essie nail polish was inspired by candy, and how your nails can look like pastel pieces of rock candy, then you have just shot yourself in the foot for ranking for the following words: essie, nail polish, candy, color. None of them are in your blog post title, as cute as it is. The search engines would most likely give you higher rankings with "Essie's New Rock Candy Color Nail Polish." You can get more clever with it, but the goal is to at least have essie and nail polish and color in your post title, because those terms may be what people are searching for.

How do you know what keywords people are searching for? You use Yahoo's free tool, Overture, or you pay for the keyword research tool Keyword Discovery. Everyone uses Overture, so it can be slow at times. But otherwise gives reliable results.

2. Grab the reader as they scan the list of blue titles in search engines to see which ones they want to click. Your titles need to be quick, short and to the point. This can be tough, if you're trying to get keywords in there. Sometimes you may need to take the SEO hit if you want your feed readers to click, rather than a search engine ranking. Read this to see how your ranking title looks in a search engine.

The point is: be cute in your blog post titles, but make sure your keywords are in there!! You may need to curb your creativity a little. :)

How to Find Good Blog Post Ideas from your OWN Website

Stumped for a blog post idea? Chances are, you're like Dorothy with her ruby red shoes - you have the answers the whole time. Instead of clicking your heels three times, just log into your your site stat program and check your Keywords.

What are site stats? They are the statistics of who is coming to your blog, how they got there, which websites sent them, which keywords or keyword phrases they used in a Google or Yahoo or any kind of search. Most hosting companies provide these for free, but there are better ones out there, also for free. Look into Google Analytics and StatCounter. Both stat programs are free and invisible.

The Keywords people are using to find your blog are actual words typed into search engines by people interested in what you have to say. You may be scoring on the term "best ceramic flat iron" or "moms who make a million dollars" (I just made these up), but what are your smaller searches for? When you look into your keywords for which terms you're getting, look for the terms that are bringing in 1 search, or 7 searches, or 20 searches.

Small potatoes, right? Yeah, well, it also shows that your blog is coming up deep in the search engine rankings for this term, but you need to do a better job of optimizing for it to bring in an easy 50, 400 or 900 new searches. And chances are, you didn't meant to optimize for it at all. A combination of words from different posts, or you side panel, made your post rank for this particular term. Now all you have to do is write a well optimized post for it.

Gold SEO Nugget Example:
One rainy day, I was sifting through keywords, curious as to how people were finding FashionMista.com. A keyword phrase caught my eye: "do I have to be a good drawer to be a fashion designer."

Excuse me? No, of course you don't. But you had to ask a search engine that question? Fine, I thought. I'll give you the answer. I titled my post that exact question because the Title is the Page Title for that web page, and the Page Title is a very hot ticket for optimizing for SEO. Next, I made sure to weave those phrases throughout my copy in a way that made sense, and I included a picture, filled in the alt tag for that picture, and linked the picture. All very important steps for SEO. Search engines do look for images, and if the image has an alt tag, and is linked, the engine considers those terms especially important, which give you more exposure via higher rankings.

The result? FashionMista is at the top of searches for related queries (yes, people continue to ask the question), and the image I posted is on page 1 in Google Images for "fashion drawing".

So, it pays to sift through your keywords for a quick and easy blog post idea. Happy hunting!

ps: if you do want to learn how to draw for fashion, get the fashion drawing book, 9 Heads, which is fabulous. There are lots of poses, pleats, and ruffles to chose from as you practice.

Mysteries of Meta Title and Description Tag Revealed

I get asked variations of questions about these tags as eager website owners try to figure out what to do with them to answer SEO needs, like: "Fill in your meta tags!" or "We'll give you Meta Tags for $$". But you want to know what the heck they are before you go and get these tags, or pay someone to get you keywords for your tags.

Title and Meta Description and Keyword Tags Overview

First of all, your keywords for the specific page go into these tags. These tags are specific to each page in your website, and are not used to generally describe what is on your whole site. They are located under the hood in your HTML code. Depending on how you update your website (straight HTML pages that you upload or through a content manager where you press Save or Publish), you will have different ways of accessing and customizing these. At their most basic level, they tell the search engine what the page is called, and what the search engine might find there.

We'll get to the pictures in a minute, but the most heavily weighted by the search engines is the Title Tag. The Meta Description Tag is less weighted, but very important for different reasons - actual people could read it in the search results and gauge if they want to click on your page or not. And how do they click on your page from the search results? By clicking on the Title Tag. The Meta Keyword Tag is not so important, but is a place where you can put a string of keywords that appear on the specific page.

Tag Definitions:
Title Tag: Shows up in your browser window and in search results (see both pictures). Search engines place good deal of weight on what you plug into here. Keywords should go at the front, as users scan the search results page and have their specific keyword that they just searched for on the brain.

The blue underlined text is the title tag that people click on to get to your page. Not just to your whole website, but to a specific page. The black text, in this case, is the meta description tag. The black text can also be viewable copy pulled from your actual page depending on the better keyword match. The green text is the URL, which is the direct way to get to that page on your website.

Meta Description Tag: It can show up in the search results when you run a search on a search engine like Google. It will only show up if there is a good keyword match between what is in meta description tag and what the user typed into the search box. Otherwise, it is
another indicator to the search engine about what is on the page. The main reason you want it filled in is to show the user a sentence about what the page is about. It's more of a marketing-type sentence and should be different than the content on your actual page. Different, as in, not identical.

The screen shot picture above shows how the meta description tag is displaying in the search results for the query: "jewelry bag travel". The below screen shot shows the first line of text on my jewelry bag page that this search result is pointing to. Usually, for a page with not a lot of content, and if there is no meta description tag, or if the copy in the tag is not a great match, the search engine will display snippets from the first few lines of actual copy from the page, and may include copy from your text based menus, etc.


This is the top of a browser window. The very tippy top has text in it. That's the title tag. See how it can show up everywhere? So you want to choose it carefully. Mine could be better, but this is what we've got for now. :) The white area is the Address Bar. It shows your URL, which was that green text from the search engine result in the picture above.

Meta Keyword Tag: This is just a long list of keywords found on the specific page like: "jewelry bag bags pouch pouches travel traveling jewlry silk pink brown drawstring pull snaps snap pocket pockets elastic" It doesn't have that much weight in the search engines, but it doesn't hurt to fill it in. And what do you fill it in with? Words that appear on the page and misspellings of those words. The meta keyword tag will not display anywhere and is only for the search engines to read.

Text on the Actual Page

See how the regular copy on this page is not the meta description tag we saw in the search results above. The title tag is in view in the top of the browser window (in picture above, not this one below). But note how the keyword that I'm targeting, "jewelry bag" is in some hot spots on the page. It is in linked copy below each image, and they all link to the specific color of jewelry bag. The text under these jewelry bag pictures is not an image. It is actual text, which is readable by search engines, which is what you want. If it's an image, the search engines can't read it. These tag images I have posted here are just images, and totally unreadable by search engines. But I have placed my desired target keywrods in other places of this post, so I can take the loss of actual text in this case.

Title and Meta Tag SumUp

Title tags are very important. The are read by users and search engines, and may be pulled by other websites who link to you, like the social networking sites like StumbleUpon. If someone uses a special website like StumbleUpon or ThisNext to vote for your page as a good page, that website will automatically pull your title tag and show it on their website. You may have Title and Meta tags filled in with keywords, but there are plenty of other places you need to put keywords, like in the body copy, alt tags, image file names (that's my theory anyway), headers and sub heads, menu copy, in text links pointing to your pages, etc etc. Now that you know this, the tricky and fun part is getting creative with how you place your keywords (that you have researched, of course). Hire out or think of creative ways yourself, but either way, be aware of it.

Good luck!

Free Vocal 411 From Google! 1-800-GOOG-411

I love GOOG 411! A little news flash in my Gmail told me about Google's new free 411 service for businesses currently percolating in their Google Labs. I called from my internet based (Vonage) land line, and the nicest mechanical man asked me: "What business name or category?" and without thinking, I just said "restaurant" and then it asked me which intersection or zip code. I wanted the number for a Joey's Pizza in Chagrin Falls, OH to see if it came up, but all I could think to say was "44022".

Not two seconds later, the man at GOOG 411 was giving me the top 8 results, starting with the very yummy Gamekeepers Tavern as a restaurant in or near 44022. Joey's Pizza was in there, as was Dinks. I tried "pizza" for 10025 in New York, and it really didn't have any pizza listings. That, or it could not understand me above my fan.

Next, I tried a direct search for Joey's Pizza. I started with "Cleveland, OH." I did not get a direct match. But clearly it was there. I tried "Moreland Hills, OH," but instead it gave me related listings, which included "Boston Market." Errr. Wrong. So then when GOOG asked me for my city and state, I gave the zip code of 44022 and stated the restaurant name. Bingo.

Extra Fun Things About Free GOOG 411:

• You can "Go Back" to go back to the place you were before. Then the GOOG Man says: "Going Back."
• Instead of a machine tinkering away after you say something, to indicate that it is thinking, a little guy is making machine noises, like "bleep dee dee bleep." And if there is a problem with what he is looking up, it will go "bleep dee dee bleep bloop bloop CONK CONK" and the GOOG Man says: "Let's just skip that part."
• You can just keep looking things up by saying "Go Back."
• The GOOG Man reads to you the address right away. He can connect you or give you more details, like recite the phone number.
• When you have found your number and you're on your mobile phone, you can just say "text message" and it will text message you (GOOG knows your mobile number) while it is connecting you to the place!

How GOOG 411 Helps Your Website SEO

To be included in GOOG 411, you need to submit your business to Google Local. Being included in Google Local gives you more chances of rising to the top in the search engines when someone does a search for your type of business and the Google Local results are displayed before all else. See this local Starbucks example. And don't forget: on Apple's new iPhone, that uses Google Maps to provide maps to phone user, the same thing is presented. So when a person is actually in their car looking to go somewhere, and they type in a search for your type of business in the local area, you will come up as a little red arrow pointing to exactly where you are, with phone number clearly displayed. My boyfriend and I just did it to find local golf stores in Portland, Maine because he was consumed with buying a (another) driver. So go submit yourself!

To use Google's free 411 service, dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone. There are still listings that are not in there. I checked for some local ones around our apartment. This may mean that the businesses need to enter themselves into Google Local, which used to just help with Internet searches. But now it also helps for free and fast 411. To add your business into Google Local, click here. Here are some good FAQs about GOOG 411. Residential 411 is not included as of this post.

How Will Google Find My Blog?

Google will definitely find your blog when another website links to you. Yahoo, Google, MSN and other search engines work in simular ways. A search engine like Google will find your blog and rate it according to how many links point to it, as well as relevant content within its pages. Therefore, in theory, you don't need to submit your blog to a search engine directory (and you should never pay one to have your blog included - search engines do not work that way, Google doesn't at least). But it doesn't hurt and is painless.

When you're blog is in a place you're satisfied with, I recomend you submit it to two places: straight to Google and to the human edited directory, dmoz. If you submit your blog to dmoz, make sure you select the right category (there's lots of them). Google may include your blog in future spiders (it's not 100%, but is likely), and a person at dmoz will one day come over and check your blog and add it if he/she likes to that directory. Dmoz does give blog and website information to Google, Yahoo and others, so you may as well submit. I'm no expert on dmoz, I just know it is recomended by bloggers to submit to it.

Because you've selected in your settings to have each post be a page, each post is qualified to come up in a search engine result for whatever you wrote about, be it "seychelles wedges" or "kadorables t-shirts." So when you're writing each post, think about what search terms a user might type into Google's search box (or another search engine) when looking for something specific. Yahoo has a great tool you can use called Overture. This was built for websites who want pay-per-click advertising on their sites. It measures what search terms are being plugged into Yahoo every month. So Overture is a free and easy to use tool to check if a phrase is being searched in search engines. Your blog has a good chance of showing up in these search results if you write your posts tightly around a phrase.

But, the bottom line is, you will rank higher in search results if you 1. have links poinint to your blog or specific posts on your blog and 2. 'optimized content' is written tightly into your posts - for those posts you want to rank for (or be found for), that is.

May the search engines be with you!