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 Get Photos into Flickr

Flickr is woderful for many reasons:
1. You can show photo albums publicly, meaning that your friends don't have to log into one of five major photo sharing sites. Or, you can mark them private, and then your friends would need to log in again.

2. You can organize the photos by albums, or "sets" and let people see what albums you have right away.

3. If you have a website, you can go to town on different ways to share photos, and include links back to relevant pages of your website from the photo's description.

But how the heck to you get your photos off of your computer and into Flickr? Here's how:

How to Post (aka Upload) Photos to Flickr:
Login using your username and password. Yahoo bought Flickr, so it may be that your Yahoo address, if you have one, is the same.

Look for the words Upload Photos. If you arrive on the Home page, these will be large and blue. All of your tools for Flickr are at the bottom of the page as text links.

Follow the Steps.
1. Choose Photos
2. Upload Photos
3. Add Titles and Descriptions to a Set. You can "Add More" if you like, which is a link at the bottom of the box you'll see after you choose your photos. You can choose many photos at once by holding down your CTRL key as you select them with your mouse.

When you're ready to upload, make sure they are clicked as Public. This is the default, so it most likely will be selected. If you want to password protect them, aka not share them with the world, click Private.

When they upload, you'll see "Finished!" Click to add a title and description. These are super important, because they help people find your type of picture when they are search through Flickr.

These next steps are important, if you are interested in getting wide exposure for your photos:
Add Tags: Tags are words or phrases that have to do with the picture. For phrases, you'll need to include " " around it, to show that the word is really a 3-word phrase. For example: trip to paris would be "trip to paris". Then, include other phrases that have to do with the picture. If it's a product, include the product name, company name, color (that can be popular), type, animal name, etc. People's names, etc. Start paying attention to other tags, so that you can include things like "paris fashions" if that is a popular tag. But you want to be relevant, so as not to disappoint someone who is expecting something. You can always add or delete tags at any time when you are logged in.

Add Title: The default is the image file name, most likley IMG_341, which is no fun. Call it "Vintage 1994 Wedding Dresses from Channel". You can be long, it's up to you.

Add Description: Self explanatory. However, if you have a website, you can link to it here if it's appropriate. "See more website designs at www.mywebsite.com"

Add to a Set: Sets are organized photos, like "30th Birthday Trip" or "Thanksgiving"

You should be all done with uploading and naming your photos! Now create some sets if you want another way to display your photos in an organized way.

Creating a Set:
For extra fun, you could create a set so that people could view like photos at once. Here's how to do it:
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Organize in the "You" category.
At the top of the screen, click the Sets tab.
Look to the right, and in gray type (hard to see) click "Create new set"
Follow the directions, but basically, drag your photos into the little box on the left. This will fling them into the big gray box.
Name your set.
Click save.

That should be it!

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!

Tags Make Your Blog Go Round

A fellow blogess needs to make links in her blog. She's having trouble understanding the concept of wrapping words with 'html tags' to make them do something, like format themselves. So, right now we're going to focus on the basics and learn about html tags. Once you get this concept, linking will come easy.

HTML Tags are your friends when making something online. You 'wrap' tags around words you want to be bold, or format in any way. Try it with me. Bold a word. To bold, you use the b tag. To italicize, you use the i tag. The arrows have to be around the tags. You have a opening tag, and a closing tag, with your the word in the middle you'd like to be formatted. A word that is bolded has those tags in back and front of it. Like this: < b >bolded< /b >. They have < b > on the left, and < /b > on the right (the < /b > closes the 'wrap' - anything with a / closes the tag). If you follow so far, make somthing bold in a comment or one of your posts, and we can move on. :)

To really see lots of html tags you can use, see this cheat sheet from Webmonkey. This may help.

You can do this!!