I control all the aspects of the following return — title and description (and maybe even placement). You should too!
How did I do that? Well, I just wrote some code and pasted it into my blog template, above the opening <body> tag, between the <head> and </head> tags. Simple but mightily effective!
<meta name="title" content="Chris Abraham - Because the Medium is the Message" />
<meta name="description" content="Chris Abraham is a leading expert on corporate blogging, the blogosphere, online social networks, virtual communities, online brand promotion, online brand protection, online brand intelligence, online buzz marketing, online guerilla marketing, and online viral marketing." />
Holler!
<meta name="title" content="Chris Abraham - Because the Medium is the Message" />
<meta name="description" content="Chris Abraham is a leading expert on corporate blogging, the blogosphere, online social networks, virtual communities, online brand promotion, online brand protection, online brand intelligence, online buzz marketing, online guerilla marketing, and online viral marketing." />
If you optimize your blog you can control the way Google shows your site to the world.
Be sure to add a “description” meta tag as Google uses it in search returns (and you can control Google’s description of your site). If you don’t want to top there, you can continue with the whole lots of meta tags.
If you want to see what meta tags I use, they’re listed at the bottom of this article. I will paste my tags at the end of here for you to enjoy. Also, make sure you give “alt” and “title” tags to all of your images and “title” tags to all of your links.
(For you newbies, the meta tags all go within the header tags in your blog template. So you will need to do some template editing.)
Four, find a Google Sitemap plug-in and use it.
Five, submit your blog as though it were a traditional website. I personally use Dynamic Submission, but there are a bunch. Web Position Gold is another fave. I choose Dynamic Submission because it allows me to spider my entire blog to within an inch of its life and then submit not just the site’s arteries but also all the way down to the site’s villi as well. In my opinion, search engines are lazy. They have only so many resources and so many nanoseconds in the day. They need to put first things first. So what I do before I spider the blog is set the index page of the blog to view 365-days of posts, or maybe a bunch of weeks, so that I can spider most of the blog from one “Import from Web.” When the import is complete, I change it back to showing only the last 7 days. I even maintain a separate box on which to host the Dynamic Submission tool because it’s such a processor hog. And then let it go. Seems to work like a charm. Why? Well, not because I am doing anything unseamly but rather just because Google and the rest sometimes miss something and I want to make sure that all the engines get everything. Every little dumbass link.
Meta Tags from ChrisAbraham.com
<link rel="DCTERMS.isreplacedby" href="http://www.chrisabraham.com" />
<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="foaf.rdf" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" />
<meta name="ICBM" content="38.8886,-76.9855">
<meta name="geo.position" content="38.8886,-76.9855">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Chris Abraham, Christopher James Abraham, Christopher J. Abraham, Chris J Abraham, Christopher Abraham, media strategist, online brand promotion, online brand protection, brand promotion, brand protection, new media strategies, nms, vbma, viral + buzz marketing association, search engine optimization, seo expert, defensive SEO, SEO promotion, Washington, DC" />
<meta name="description" content="Chris Abraham is a leading expert on corporate blogging, the blogosphere, online social networks, virtual communities, online brand promotion, online brand protection, online brand intelligence, online buzz marketing, online guerilla marketing, and online viral marketing." />
<meta name="DC.Description" content="Chris Abraham Official Blog" />
<meta name="title" content="Chris Abraham - Because the Medium is the Message" />
<meta name="language" content="en" />
<meta name="author" content="Chris Abraham" />
<meta name="abstract" content="Chris Abraham Official Blog" />
<meta name="publisher" content="Chris Abraham " />
<meta name="copyright" content="Chris Abraham">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="after 1 day">
<meta name="page-topic" content="Chris Abraham Official Blog">
<meta name="page-type" content="Personal Home Page">
<meta name="audience" content="all">
<meta name="generator" content="http://www.chrisabraham.com/">
<title>Chris Abraham - Because the Medium is the Message</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.chrisabraham.com/styles-site.css" type="text/css" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="http://www.chrisabraham.com/atom.xml" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 1.0" href="http://www.chrisabraham.com/index.rdf" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://www.chrisabraham.com/index.xml" />
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://www.chrisabraham.com/rsd.xml" />
