You are reading an MD 2.0 (make money online) entry.
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.
Title Tag
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.
Description Tag
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:
A young man in his 20’s who blogs about money making ideas, technology and sometimes his personal struggles and thoughts.
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.
Keywords Tag
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”.
Warning: Do not place any word more than three times, or Google will consider your blog spam!
The meta tags
The following shows how you can place the meta tags within your “header” tag. You can replace the words in red with your own.
Wordpress “All in One SEO” Plugin
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.
Read possibly related posts:
- Are Meta Tags Still Relevant in SEO?
- For Those Serious Bloggers Who Haven’t Tried…
- How to Optimise Your Title Tag
- No Secret! How to Rank High on Google Search
- Not Doing SEO for New Blog May Cause…
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By Horizon on Jan 3, 2009 | Reply
Cool. Thanks for the SEO tips
By Kenneth "Definite" Lee on Jan 4, 2009 | Reply
No prob, Horizon. Interesting write-up on “You Cannot Serve both God and Money”.
By lifeplayer on Feb 18, 2009 | Reply
Great SEO tips for the beginner. It is very useful to know more about SEO
By Leadership Training FL on May 21, 2009 | Reply
Nice plugin. Thanks for information. I will download it.
By vamsi krishna from C# coding help on Nov 30, 2009 | Reply
Hi, I got a doubt.I actually used a word more than 3 times in my keywords section, but with different word combinations like for example C#, C#.net, C#.net articles.
Does that make my blog a spam
By Jr Deputy Accountant on Mar 17, 2010 | Reply
It’s amazing how many blogs miss this - at least non-SEO-related ones. I’m pretty sure I’m the only financial blogger who has implemented a lot of SEO tactics on my site… here’s to hoping the competition never catches on.
Now what about those of us using Blogger??
By Jackie from Money Blogging on Apr 7, 2010 | Reply
I want to be a succesful online Marketier someday,thats why i really do my best visiting some site that truly can help to build more idea on how to make money on blogging.Ofcourse,i would be a patient on doing step by step process so that i can win what i want in online business..tnx for this blog!gl
By derek from Search Engine Optimization Keywords on Jul 12, 2010 | Reply
You are 110% correct with all the data but..Have you tried to find out the competition on your Keywords like Masha College and Dr.., Have yu tried it with High competition keywords..That’s where the trick lies..But I agree with all that you have written but there is some thing more…
By Steve on Aug 27, 2010 | Reply
This really are some useful advice on seo. I definitely agree that keywords play an important role in search engine optimisation. Optimizing meta keywords manually or using a plugins to do so really works. One thing I’d like to add though, one should not forget to have a quality and relevant content on blogposts too.