I think search engine optimization has been blown way out of proportion. It’s been made this almost mystic art of gaming the search engines and learning to speak google. I don’t disagree that being great at SEO requires a good set of technical understanding and knowledge (both of Google and HTML/CSS/XHTML). There are some tweaks, however, that fit into the category of SEO, are greatly important, but hardly require a technical depth. The one I am about to explain is a great example.
How to add a meta description just to your blogs index page.
First off, a meta description is a tag that holds the description of what your blog (or website) is about. Taking it one step further, search engines often use the meta description you provide as the description for your blog in the search engines results page (the page you see that lists all of the results for your search). Simple, right?
Why should you care about having a meta description?
A great blog post title can be the difference between a post that brings in a ton of traffic, links, and new readers, and a dud. Even if the content is awesome on it, if the title sucks, no one will want to read your post. That’s why most good bloggers spend a fair amount of time thinking about the title of their blog posts.
Your meta description works in the same way . While not the title of your blog, it’s the additional descriptive [sales] copy that accompanies your title. And good sales copy can help to convince potential readers to come to your blog.
How to add your own meta description to your blog’s index page.
Goto the admin area of your blog, click on Appearance, goto editor, and click the link that says “header.php” or similar. That will load your header file and its respective code.
Now, in-between the <head></head> tags there’s going to be a bunch of stuff. Insert the following code somewhere near the “meta http-equiv”:
<? if( !wp_title() )
{
?> <meta name=”description” content=”Your blogs description.” /> <?
}
?>
And save the file. Viola, you’re done. Just for clarification, this will only add the meta description you specify to your blogs main page (otherwise known as its index page). The reason we’re only adding it there is because the meta description is effectively auto-generated for every one of your posts. The “effectiveness” gets a bit dicey when it comes to your index page, though.
Do you have any good tips on how to increase traffic to a blogger blog?
There’s a lot of ways to increase traffic to one’s blog. To speak to a sustainable method that not only increases your traffic, but begins to involve you in the community of bloggers (where the real benefit of blogging begins to happen), my main suggestion would be, if you’re not already, find blogs to read. Blogs that are pertinent to what you’re writing about, and written by individuals who you could get along with. Then comment on their blog, shoot them an e-mail, and start a conversation with the blogger. Blogging is just as much about networking with other bloggers as it is about producing content people want to read.
Hope that helps!
So adding a meta description will help improve traffic to my site huh? Well thank you very much for this informative post and showing how to do it.