Blog Titles and Meta Descriptions
If you’ve established a photography blog for yourself to improve your SEO, congratulations! But did you know that blogging once or twice a week, using keywords in your content, and posting great galleries are only the start to getting you improved rankings? The truth is that most search engines look at more than just your content to determine whether or not your site is relevant to someone’s search terms.
Two things that beginning bloggers often overlook are blog titles and blog meta descriptions. Let’s take a look at how these two things can help you maximize the search engine optimization for your photography blog.
Search engines like Google search your blog to see if it can find terms that match the search terms someone types in to the search box. Google will likely look at your page or blog post title first so it can determine the topic of your content. Are you placing keywords in your blog post titles? If not, it’s time to start. Keep titles to under 60 characters, which is the most that will appear in a search result listing. And remember that a space counts as a character.
Keep your blog post titles specific to the content of that page or post. It’s what will appear in blue on the top of a Google search result. The searcher’s terms will show up in your title as bolded words, so you want to match the keywords in your title to terms or phrases that people search for most often.
Underneath the blue title in a search result listing is the black test describing the page or the blog post. This text is the meta description. It doesn’t necessarily appear anywhere on your actual blog page, but it is very important. Why? Think about the last time you did a Google search. Did you read the black text below the title line to see which entry best fit your needs? Most people do. So you want that black text meta description to be as accurate and enticing as possible.
The searcher’s terms will also show up as bolded in the meta description, helping them identify how relevant your site is to their search. Your homepage title and meta description should be well thought out and accurately reflect your expertise, location and description because it will pop up in search results more often than your subpages.
By managing your photography blog titles and blog meta descriptions, you can increase your click through rate and your page ranking in search results. This kind of SEO is key to getting you new clients.
A few points to keep in mind when writing photography blog titles or meta descriptions:
Use titles on every page and every blog post.
Keep your titles to 60 characters or less and your meta descriptions to 160 characters or less. Anything over that will not show up in a search result list.
Make sure your blog title and your website title are different so you increase your exposure.
Keep it simple. Focus on one or two main concepts rather than trying to fit in all your areas of expertise or locations.
Don’t make titles or descriptions just a list of keywords; this looks like spam in a search result list, and many search engines will lower your ranking if it looks like you’re trying to cram in a bunch of keywords without relevant content.
With these tips, you should be able to update your photography blog titles and meta descriptions to improve your SEO in no time.
