Stand out in search engines and improve the usability of your content with WordPress and Turbocharged
The search engine game is not just about getting top result spots. It’s also about what the user sees once your content hits the first result page. Here’s an example:
See it? This search result shows an excerpt from the page.
While this particular search result might be somewhat relevant to its content, it’s important to note that this excerpt could be about anything unrelated to the content of your page: navigation elements, comments, … Evidently, you could be squandering the value of your search engine ranking.
Now check this one out:
This one doesn’t show an excerpt from the page, although it may look like one. Instead, it shows a nice, controlled summary. A controlled summary is superior to a simple excerpt, because it’s controlled, and thus has the potential to convey much more focused information to your potential search engine visitors.
Getting the summaries under control
So, how do you get these summaries?
The answer is easy: by including a META tag with the description. Yes, you must type it, but it pays off: proficient and informed search engine users will instantly and unconsciously focus on the summary, instead of focusing in the competition.
And that’s exactly what you want.
Fortunately, with Turbocharged (and, somewhat more involved, with WordPress) there’s an easy way to add a summary to each article or page.
A simple plugin lets you write these summaries
To activate this option in Turbocharged, you need to do these simple steps:
- Go to the Plugins tab in the WordPress management console.
- Activate the plugin named Another Wordpress Meta Plugin.
That’s it.
Those of you who are using regular WordPress can, in theory, look the plugin up on the Web, install it and then activate it, but we’ve put together Turbocharged to avoid exactly that hassle.
Writing posts with search engine summaries
Now, when you write a post, the following will appear below the post writing area:
Fill the Description field, and off you go. The next time your favorite search engine crawls your article, it’ll pick the description up and use it as the summary. Not hard at all, is it?
Remember to be responsible; we wouldn’t want you to use that summary for dishonest purposes, and search engines could delist you for that.
Getting your blog’s tagline as the summary of your front page
If you want to use some text (usually, your blog’s tagline) as the summary on your front page, you’ve got two choices.
The manual way
Edit your theme’s header.php file. Right before the closing </head> tag, you could conceivably add this:
<?php if (is_home()) { ?>
<meta name="description" content="<?php echo get_bloginfo("description"); ?>" />
<?php } ?>
This would cause the description tag to appear only on your home page.
The automatic, Meta Plugin assisted way
But there’s a better way. If you’ve successfully enabled the Another Wordpress Meta Plugin, you can:
- open your WordPress management console,
- hit the Options tab, then
- hit the Another Wordpress Meta Plugin sub-tab
Now, on the field Home Description, type what you’d like to appear as your blog’s front page description:
The Another Wordpress Meta Plugin options panel
Do it well — the art of microcontent
Of course, this entire article begs the question: what is a good description to write in?
This is all related to microcontent. Microcontent is content that’s short and sweet (or at least it should be, in theory). Headings, hyperlink texts and titles, image descriptions and META tags are excellent examples of microcontent. Your microcontent writing proficiency can make or break your site.
To answer my own question: a good summary is whatever best conveys what the article is about, in one sentence. For that, you’ll need a little bit of copywriting and a little bit of empathy — put yourself in the shoes of your potential readers. And you absolutely need to keep it under two sentences, otherwise the summary will be chopped off in the search results.
You don’t necessarily need to give away the “selling point” of your article — you could use the summary as a teaser. There are thousands of possible uses for the summary, but you need to keep this in mind: it’s about results, and it’s about honesty.
I’m confident you can muster the empathy to write good descriptions. As for copywriting, I’ll give you one example of what not do to:
So what’s wrong with it?
- It’s too long. Therefore, it obviously gets chopped.
- It tries to mix too many messages.
- It repeats the page title. A waste of space, especially since the title is right above it.
- It says Main page. Which prospective readers care about that?
Want to learn more about the subject? I’ll just refer you to Copyblogger — they have much more experience than me.
Do it today!
Keep this in mind: search engines don’t crawl each year — they’re perpetually fetching new versions of your site — and your competitors’ as well. The sooner you do it, the sooner you’ll see results.
In the meantime, I sincerely wish you a great day. Get Turbocharged today!