SEO: The Most Important Parts of Your Page
So, I’ve mentioned this before. The title and description are the most important parts of any web page when it comes to SEO.
They’re also the most important part of any blog post, if you want to get your posts ranked in the search engines. But did you know that there are two different ways you need to think about this when blogging?
When we’re talking about your blog as a whole, the title should be your keywords, linked together by dashes. This is how you want your general blog title to be, which you set up in the “Settings” tab.
You’ll notice that my blog title is “OVBlogger: SEO News – WordPress – Marketing Blog” These are the three keywords I’m working on getting ranked for now, and the title is 48 characters in length.
Did you know that search engine spiders will only read 65 characters of your title? Yep. Be sure that you’re using your three most important keyword phrases in your blog’s title and that they don’t go over the 65 character limit. Use your most important keyword first, the second most important keyword second, and so on.
Then also in the settings tab, write a good keyword rich description (tagline) for your blog. What’s it about? Write it naturally, but try to avoid using stop words like a, the, an, for, etc. Mine is: “SEO news, WordPress, marketing blog from Pat Marcello” I’m the least important part of that description, but I want me to show up on the front of my blog, right? The spiders are seeing what I want them to see but people know what my blog is about and that I’m the one writing it.
But with a blog, you also need to think about the title of every post.
Each post is like a page in your site. (Not to be confused with blog pages, which are also pages in your site, but have a different purpose from posts.) But, you also want people to be interested enough in your title to want to read them, so linked keyword phrases won’t work.
What I do is to put the most relevant keyword into my title first. In this case, it’s SEO because my post is about having a search engine friendly title and description. But, I follow that keyword with a title that might entice readers.
As with any web page, the title and description are crucial to search engine ranking for your posts. Be sure to use the plugin All-in-One SEO Pack so that you can add specific title and description to every post you make and then, write post titles and descriptions that are keyword rich and will work for spiders and people alike.
When in doubt, always please your reader first. If folks don’t enjoy reading what you write, no ranking in the search engines will help you.
Amitesh Kumar
February 11th, 2009 at 10:38 pm #
Thanks for the information.I did not know exactly that the search engine spiders read 65 characters.Yes keywords are the secret of getting placed higher on search engine results.Lot of emphasis is being paid on selecting the keywords which can drive traffic.
Jon
February 13th, 2009 at 12:29 pm #
Thanks for this article on search engine optimization. It really helped me learn about the use of keywords, as well as how spiders work. I have started using the All-In-One SEO pack and I think that is a good reccomendation.
Humaidi
February 14th, 2009 at 10:28 pm #
Try to arrange the keyword first in the title. It will help a lot in term of optimiztion.
Yasha
February 16th, 2009 at 4:42 pm #
Yes, you made a good article about the bloggiing.When we talk about blog It is very important that we have valuable keywords. Becouse when we type some key word on google they open lots of websites and when these keywords match with the our website than it will come first in google search..
satheesh
February 18th, 2009 at 2:31 pm #
your article about seo( search engine optimization ) is very useful for my blogging talent optimization. even though i had good info on my blog, the readers are very low. is this same keyword used for all search engine optimization like cuil, yahoo etc..,
Pat Marcello
February 18th, 2009 at 6:56 pm #
Hi Satheesh,
Yep… Whatever works for Google generally works for the other search engines, too. That’s why SEOs optimize for Google.
There are some differences. For example, Yahoo still pays attention to the “keyword” META tag, whereas Google doesn’t. For that reason, it’s still a good idea to use it.
– Pat
Anna
February 18th, 2009 at 10:18 pm #
Thanks for this information about SEO and titles and descriptions. I didn’t realize that spiders only read a portion of titles! I also did not know that separating words/phrases in a title was an SEO tool, I’ll have to give that a try. I also like your idea about starting a blog title with the keyword and then tacking on the user friendly title, I’ll definitely be trying that one!
alwayshopeful
February 19th, 2009 at 6:01 pm #
This is very interesting and thorough. I started my own blog just a few months ago and while I knew the importance of page titles at my website I completely overlooked the importance for my blog. I also never spent much time on the titles for the posts, making sure they were google friendly and search friendly. Great advice and thanks!
Nick
February 20th, 2009 at 2:59 pm #
What a useful information , I must say! I didn’t know about the search engine spiders earlier. Thanks for the important information!
Alison Kerr, Earthonaut
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:03 pm #
I’ve managed to learn a few things about SEO through trial and error. Not the best way!
Is there a significance to putting dashes in the title? I’ve not read about this before. Does Google recognize these as separate keywords? This sounds really significant. Do let me know please.
Thanks.
Pat Marcello
February 24th, 2009 at 11:11 am #
Hi Alison,
No… In fact you can use the pipe (like this |) instead, if you prefer.
No significance whatsoever. Either is just a way to separate your keywords.
- Pat
Link building
February 26th, 2009 at 8:02 am #
Dear that is really a nice information i dont know about that the limit for catching the keyword by spider, the perfect keyword play a important role for SEO. Thnx dear.