Writing Web Meta Descriptions and Titles: Three Easy Tips

CROWDSOURCE UPDATE: Behold the power of a down day. After [intlink id="2489" type="post"]Day 13[/intlink], where I broke the site and put up a maintenance page, I have yet to receive a single vote or comment for [intlink id="2472" type="post"]Day 14[/intlink]. Either I’m experiencing some backlash, the weather was really nice, or CAPTCHA codes are really boring. In any case, the poll is still open, so please [intlink id="2472" type="post"]head over to Day 14 and cast your vote[/intlink]!

All this internalized, metatextual blogging about blogging and designing while writing about designing makes me feel like I’m Pirandello’s seventh character, or like I’m trying to timequake Kurt Vonnegut back to life with some HTML-based magic spell.

Today, this goes a step further—I’ll be writing the meta tags for Blog Salad. Meta tags tell web browsers and search engines additional information about your site. They’re like the About page for robots; they tell crawler bots what keywords are related to your site and what description should appear in a search engine results.

Google’s Webmaster Central Blog has great tips for writing a good meta description and there are literally thousands of posts and pages on the topic, but I’ll give you three very quick tips:

1. Be brief. Keep your description to 160 characters, Google’s limit.  Better still? Keep it to 140 characters for the day when Twitter becomes a real time search engine.
2. Be honest. Go ahead and use resources like SEOBook’s Keyword Suggestion Tool, but avoid the urge to add “Angelina Jolie” (who gets 30,000+ searches per day on Google) to your site’s keywords and post meta titles unless you’re a celebrity gossip blog. Search engines are rumored to penalize sites that use deceptive keywords.
3. Be automated. If you have WordPress, plugins like All-in-One SEO Pack will do the heavy-lifting for you. There’s no perfect substitute for doing the work yourself, but if you’re like me, you hardly have time to write the content that humans are reading, much less what the robots are reading.

So there you go, a few tips to take your blog’s meta to a whole new level!

No poll today; this meta stuff can be quite boring, like those sleepy DVD extras where the poor director and producer are forced to ramble about the creative process behind each scene of the film.

Actually, instead, I have a little entertainment for you—and proof that creative spirit can overcome even the most mundane metatextual babble. Film writer and director Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, decided to sing his entire DVD extra commentary  for Dr. Horrible.  The following video of Whedon is from a live show of NPR’s This American Life, where Whedon performs one of the commentary songs from the DVD—it’s a satirical analysis of DVD commentaries.  Talk about taking meta to a whole new level.  Bon apetit!

Singing director DVD commentary not your cup of tea, er, bag of popcorn? Read Pirandello’s 1925 Virginia Quarterly Review essay, “Pirandello Confesses,” where he explains why and how he wrote “Six Characters in Search of an Author.” Or even better, just read the play right here.