How to Optimize Your Blog Title and Description for the Search Engines

How to Optimize Your Blog Title and Description for the Search Engines


Blogging is a very time-consuming business model, no question about it.

There's a lot that goes into it: design and technical aspect of it, content creation, networking, bringing traffic, and plus, of course, SEO.

SEO can be a scary beast for many bloggers - anything unfamiliar will be.

However, as with all other things, it's best to start learning SEO with the basics.

On-page optimization that is.

Things that are easy to learn, easy to implement and easy to control, since they are located right there, on your blog.

The two main on-page factors we will be talking about today are your page titles and descriptions.

Page titles are what you see at the top of your browser window when looking at any page.

For instance, when you are at Traffic Generation Cafe home page, you'll see "Traffic Generation Cafe | Generate Targeted Website Blog Traffic."

That's my blog title.

That's also what you see when you Google my blog. My blog title will show up at the top of the listing for my blog.

So how do you set your blog title?

The easiest way to do it is from your WordPress dashboard, go under "Settings", then "General".

You'll see a tab called "Site Title". Whatever you add to that section will become your blog title and will show up in the search engine rankings.

A couple of things to remember when writing your blog title:

1. First of all, don't forget to do keyword research before adding your title.
2. Add your primary keywords at the very beginning of your title.
3. Don't use any so-called "stop" words in your title, like "and", "but", "or", etc.
4. Keep your title under 70 characters (that's all Google cares about).
5. Use a character separator like " | " when dividing keyword phrases.

Let's move on to your blog description.

The only time someone sees your blog description is in the search engine results. That's what you see right under your blog title.

There are two ways to add a blog description to your blog: through your blog theme or via an SEO plugin.

Some WordPress themes have SEO capabilities, others don't, in which case you'd have to go the plugin way.

To add your blog description via Thesis theme, for instance, go under Thesis Site Options, then Home Page SEO. You can add both your title and blog description and even blog meta keywords right there.

If you theme is well built and optimized - as it should be - you can find a similar function somewhere in the theme dashboard.

And what to do when you don't have such options?

An SEO plugin to the rescue.

There are many choices out there, to say the least.

The most popular ones are All-in-one SEO Pack or WordPress SEO by Yoast. Both will work equally well for the task.

One thing to be cautious about when choosing the right plugin for your blog is to make sure it doesn't conflict with your theme or slow down your blog.

Since Google made site speed one of search engine ranking factors as of late, it's extremely important to make sure that whatever plugin you choose doesn't put brakes on your site speed or else your SEO traffic will suffer.

Better yet, don't use too many plugins to begin with - stick with the ones your blog can't live without and use your theme functions for everything else.

And to learn more about on-page optimization to drive more search engine web traffic to your blog, take a look at this, Thesis Theme Wordpress optimization post from Traffic Generation Cafe.