Blog Optimization

[Nelson Swett]

I went through and listened to and watched the webinar from yesterday. At about 26:20 mark Lynn posted this in the text chat:

"Blog Optimiziation is probably a good topic for a forum thread - we'll try to discuss that here too, but in case we don't post a thread at http://www.selfstartersweeklytips.com/members/"

this was in response to several questions along these lines:

"For bloggers, the SEO plugin says we should only use 160 characters in our meta description. Is that true?"

"where do you put meta description for each wordpress blog post, does that go in the excerpt spot? (without using a plugin)"

"What about a blog static home page Title/Description vs Post Title/Description tags?"

"So how do I do this meta tag in my blog"

"In a blog, can we have different meta data, etc. on each page? I don't see how."

I watched for some of these questions to be answered, and admit that I may have missed it, but any thoughts and suggestions, ideas and tips would be greatly appreciated. My site is a WP Theme and I'm wondering about the Meta Tages, etc...

Thanks.

[Lynn Terry]

Thanks Nelson!

As for the number of characters in the meta description, that varies greatly. Even the suggestions vary, as you'll see in these results:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=meta+description+characters

Around 150 characters seems to be the "general rule".

The main point being that you include your preferred keyword phrase for each page in the meta description tag for that page. This will 'encourage' Google to use your carefully crafted description when someone searches that phrase.

If someone finds your page searching a different phrase, one that is not in your meta description, Google will pull text from the content of the page instead to use as the description in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

I don't use any SEO Plugins for WordPress, so I can't comment on that. I do however use the Optional Excerpt below the composition window, as this is the text that Aweber grabs and uses as the description for that post when it emails my blog subscribers (using their Blog Broadcast feature).

I've checked it, and Google does not use my hand-written Optional Excerpt as a description in the search results.