English: Federated Search Engine Diagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Creating your perfect wine blog title is an art… and a science.
Jose recently turned me onto my SEO functions, and I began to use them. I stopped using things that I though were ‘sexy” titles. Part of me was feeling, “Whatever, if search engines pick up my stories, then I’ve done my job.” The other part of me was feeling like I had become a corporate shill; but I kept on, so my blog posts would be easily picked up whenever someone was searching about a specific topic.
SIDEBAR: I sometimes feel like I’m chained to this wine blogging world, being concerned about how many people are really reading my blog posts… I chuckle at those who talk about the “hits” they’ve had, knowing that it’s “unique visitors” that count… We’re all so concerned with the popularity factor, but is that really why we’re blogging? I’m actually not really really concerned about that one. I’m journaling, pure and simple, when it’s all said and done. Then, I wake up and know, it really doesn’t matter. In 10,000 years, none of this is going to matter… maybe in only 100 years, none of this will matter. My great grandchildren won’t even know – or care – about me… And then, I feel like my head is screwed back on tightly again, and off I go.)
Still, the present is very much here, and I greatly respect what others have done for me with visibility…
Like Cyril Penn of Wine Business, who picked up my blog in the very first round of who he was featuring as a wine industry blogger. I was one of 11 bloggers, when that happened, and the only woman blogger. Then Lewis Perdue, of Wine Industry Insights, came along and began to feature bloggers…. He just “found me,” and off I went with his newsletter, too.
Recently, I got the dreaded Email that proved what I was intuitively feeling, was dead on, telling me what I needed to hear… That I needed to find one more way to please all people at all points of interest, including editors who are reviewing wine blogs for their morning content.
From Lewis Perdue:
You write some great stuff … I’d like to use more of it, but many of your headlines are not descriptive (The recent “ask Jo” for example) and don’t “grab” readers with contextual, intuitive information that allows a News Fetch reader to decide whether they should spend time to read it.
Readers are pressed for time and you need to let them know that you have something that’s valuable enough for them to spend time with your pieces.
I visit 200+ web sites every morning. In many ways, my attention span is much like the average web surfer’s: Headline? First paragraph? If the hook isn’t set early and often, or I’m annoyed by flashing, twitching sliders, flash and auto-run videos, then it’s off to somewhere else.
just a thought,
Well, it was a good thought. It helped me to realize that while I was taking care of the SEO part of what I was doing, I had completely abandoned the sexiness that headlines need for grabbing people’s attention.
Word Press gives us the benefit of “fill in the blank” fields. While I had gone from being in the “Nothing here for anyone, just move on… the Grey Zone” to the ultimate green zone with all things checked off… I had lost the reader.
What follows is what I’ve done to segue into what will work for all. Perhaps this will help you, too… and big thanks to Lewis Perdue for waking me up:
Creating your perfect wine blog title – Wine Blog
wine blog title
SEO Title: Creating your perfect wine blog title
Meta Description: wine blog title
Here’s a page analysis, just in case you can’t get to this in your back end… this is what you need to consider. My blog page is now fit for SEO and, let’s see if Lewis Perdue picks up this one…
| The keyword density is 0.85%, which is a bit low, the keyword was found 5 times. | |
| Orange Zone (Cold) | The images on this page do not have alt tags containing your keyword / phrase. |
| Orange Zone | The page title contains 37 characters, which is less than the recommended minimum of 40 characters. Use the space to add keyword variations or create compelling call-to-action copy. |
| Yellow Zone (Getting Warmer) | The meta description is under 120 characters, however up to 156 characters are available. The available space is shorter than the usual 155 characters because Google will also include the publication date in the snippet. |
| Yellow Zone | The page title contains keyword / phrase, but it does not appear at the beginning; try and move it to the beginning. |
| Yellow Zone | No subheading tags (like an H2) appear in the copy. |
| Yellow Zone | The copy scores 73.2 in the Flesch Reading Ease test, which is considered fairly easy to read. |
| Green Zone (Hot and right on) | This page has 1 outbound link(s). |
| Green Zone | The keyword / phrase appears in the URL for this page. |
| Green Zone | You’ve never used this focus keyword before, very good. |
| Green Zone | The meta description contains the primary keyword / phrase. |
| Green Zone | There are 594 words contained in the body copy, this is more than the 300 word recommended minimum. |
| Green Zone | The keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy. |
I don’t think about SEO, but writing headlines for websites at the Chronicle and SF Weekly is good experience. If you write a clever headline that says nothing about the story, it doesn’t tell people why they should click on it.
Go take a look at the headlines at New York Times.com and SFGate and a few other websites. With few exceptions they tell you what the story is going to be. In the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and people bought newspapers printed on dead trees, that wasn’t the case, and one could actually win awards for headline wit that barely represented the story.
But even there, “Headless body found in topless bar” is still famous 50 years later because it’s really all you need to know.
Nice to see some of the technical aspects of blogging being talked about from a wine blogger!!
My $0.02 — technical SEO may becoming less crucial than what is now referred to as “social SEO”. This may be over simplifying the landscape, but google finally got smart to all the less than credible sites that figured out how to beat technical (key word) SEO, and have reformulated their algorithms to give credit to those sites with more social activity (i.e. shares, engagement, etc.).
My advice: insert the SEO by Yoast plugin into your wordpress site, and add Google authorship (Rel=Author). Then focus on creating content that people find valuable and will share.
Oh, and join Google Plus.
I loved the article as the title caught my eye. See, it did match the article.
I’m starting a new wine blog and have been focused on all aspects of search, page ranking and the like. What Cindy talks about is pretty spot on from what I’ve learned.
Now I haven’t done much social networking, not because I’m against it or think it won’t work, because I do, but instead because I have to build it in some meaningful way. I do agree that keywords are not completely gone but that congruency in your title and article along with site structure are real big.
If I’m right, I’ll make it as a wine blogger. If not, I’ll keep trying till I do.
Thanks,
Kevin