Some of you are probably gonna say I’m a hypocrite. Yes, I am — in the case of Facebook. OK, I posted an entry to condemn social networking sites, saying that I would not sign up for Facebook.

In early morning of the New Year’s day, my best friend Kenlin semi-”forcefully” help me to sign up a Facebook account. So it turned out that the first I did during the New Year is to do what I said not to do. Haha.

I still do not play games in Facebook, but a good thing about the social networking site is that it allows me to automatically ping my entry everytime I press “publish”.

This is a good feature for a blogger like me as it helps facilitate viral promotion of this blog. You post an entry, it gets pinged automatically to facebook, and people get to know and read or even share it.

Two days ago, my friend Abby posted some photos onto Facebook and caused an explosion in my email account…

The photos have triggered hundreds of discussions in just a matter of days and hence the amount of notifications in my inbox. I shall turn off the notification feature from now on…

I received two and a half pages of these.

After close to 20 days of Facebook exposure, I’m now kinda fed up with it already. So what’s next?

If you are relatively new in the blogging scene and still experimenting with ways to increase your blog traffic, here is a tip you might want to consider — it works pretty well for me and many others.

It is called meta tag optimisation, which is a part of the search engine optimisation (SEO) effort aimed at increasing your blog relevance in search results (i.e., searchability). Meta tags include blog title, description, keywords.

For example, if you google “Masha College“, you will see that my link appears on top of the search page. This gives me the advantage because people are more likely to click on my link first compared to others, thereby increasing my web traffic.

Part of the reason is because I’m using the correct keywords in my meta tags — on the title per se and also in the content. There are of course many other factors as well, but I’m just gonna dwell on the appropriate use of keywords here.

Placement of correct keywords that best describe your website or content can be done by including the meta tags within the “header” tag of your website. There are three important types of meta tags.

Come out with the shortest title that best describes your blog. It is best to have a title of about 65 characters, or eight words.

As for this blog, the title is “mrdefinite.com – It’s money-making hot.” as of now; it has only exactly 39 characters (or four words). It is not the best, but contains the word “money-making”, which could reflect what type of a blog I’m running.

If I were to only put “mrdefinite.com” as the title, it might keep people wondering, “Is this an entertainment blog, or what?” I shall show you how to place your title tag later.

This principle also applies to individual blog post titles. Again I stress the title of your post should be specific and reflective of the content your blog post.

The title of this blog post is “Blog Traffic Trick for Beginners…”. Throw one glance at it and you know it has to do with increasing blog traffic — targeted at people who are new to blogging. I could have used “newbies” instead of “beginners”, but decided to stick to the latter as it is a more popular keyword based on the Google Keyword Popularity Tool.

The description tag describes your website. It has a similar function as the title tag — to explain the blog you are running, but it has the ability to offer what the title alone cannot explain. It provides people understanding on your blog to a greater extent. Take a look at my blog’s description:

The ideal description will have only about 20 words and I have exactly 20 words. I put it that way because I feel it can pull the best searchability yet maintain the “personality” of this blog. Google “mrdefinite” and this is how the blog is presented:

See? The description is included exactly like how I wanted it to be. When people type on keywords like “money-making” and “technology”, this blog will be more relevantly listed on the search page compared to other blogs that do no have such keywords.

The keywords tag summarises your blog using a string of related keywords not more than 300 characters (around 25 words). The keywords of this blog are “Money, Advertising, Marketing, Technology, News, Entertainment, Music, Politics, Video, Reviews, Download, Asia”.

The following shows how you can place the meta tags within your “header” tag. You can replace the words in red with your own.

For those of you who are using WordPress, the “All in One SEO” plugin is all you need to optimise your meta tags. My blog saw a spike in traffic several days after having installed the plugin. I wish I had the statistics to share with you.

Basically the settings of the plugin are easy. The following demonstrates part of the options:

With this plugin installed, I can instruct it to automatically re-write my original title without that of interfering individual posts, as well as category, search and archive pages.

I also have the option to give individual posts (a.k.a sub-pages of this blog) a unique description, and keywords. In other words, instead of optimisating meta tags in your main blog like discussed above, this plugin allows optimisation in individual pages:

Above is an option as appeared in the “Write Post” sub-panel. Convenient, isn’t it?

So stop fretting how you don’t get any traffic and start optimising your meta tags liao. If these little steps works for a small, growing blog like mine, it will work the same for you if you start implementing/experimenting!

P/S: Share with me your experience in meta tag optimisation. The comment area does NOT have the “nofollow” attribute on; by sharing your experience or opinion here, you can simultaneously increase your backlinks.