social media optimization: description tags and why you need to care

Posted by Carlen Lea on May 30, 2007 in Culture, Technology | 8 comments

It seems like one of the basic tools of search engine optimization (SEO) is falling through the cracks, when it’s become more important than ever. I’m really surprised how many sites, are failing to deploy unique titles and descriptions on every page of the site. While there is debate in the SEO community about how search engines, and Google in particular, make use of the description tag — it’s critical for solid interactive marketing.

Why you ask?

Let’s put the basics of good search engine optimization aside for a moment, and look at the new reason to care: social bookmarking sites. All those sites that you see under the “share this” link on my site and so many others — that’s why you care. When you click on a social bookmarking link, it pulls the page title and description. If it’s blank — you leave it to the visitor to fill it in. If you’ve pre-filled it with helpful, accurate information — most people just leave it be. If you fill it with inaccurate, self-serving crap, a lot of people will change it.

Still don’t think it’s important? Well, here is a screen capture of what I got when I tried to bookmark an article on blogging giant Shel Holtz’s site. Can you tell what article I was looking at? Can you tell what category of the blog I’m in? Me neither? Now, I have to type in everything myself or decide how much I REALLY cared about this article and if I still want to save it for later reference.

Now you may say — who really cares? So, CarlenLea’s bookmarks won’t be snazzy for her. Hmmm…okay. But what about the search and visibility value here? Social bookmarking sites provide those lovely in-bound links we all love. People like me share my links with hundreds (or thousands) of other people. So, do you really want to just let me write my own message here, or would you like to guide me a little? I’m actually really shocked that this fell through the cracks with some like Shel Israel.

Let’s look at Social Media Optimization guru Rohit Bhargava’s site and see if he missed this important little tidbit. I’m actually crossing my fingers here, because I really respect Rohit and he knows his stuff. So I’m going to be happy if his titles and descriptions are really optimized for social bookmarking.

But, sadly — they aren’t. Rohit’s are better than Shel’s but, it’s still a generic description not article specific, and the name of the article comes after the name of the site. Okay — that’s really just personal preference, but I really like to have the post title first on blogs. And very weirdly, some has added additional HTML text to the description which then appears in the description field of the bookmark. I have no idea where that bold and italicized text is supposed to appear.

This makes me very sad, and here’s a frowny face to prove it.

So, now I’m going to put my site up to the test. I’ve installed the “All in One SEO Pack” plugin for WordPress, so it should be pretty decent. I’m using the last article I wrote, which apparently wasn’t interesting enough to merit any comments — but that’s an issue for later discussion.

Hey look at that! (to the right –>) Custom titles and descriptions on article pages! Now, I know perfectly well that my title is too long by search optimization standards, but I can live with that.

So what have we learned here? Social media optimization and search engine optimization go hand-in-hand. The same rules really apply. Develop high quality content and pay attention to those titles and descriptions. Not only is Google using them as a way to see if you have duplicate content, which is bad, but they also matter because of all those thousands (millions?) of people who use sites like social bookmarking sites like:

• ma.gnolia,
• del.icio.us.
• furl, and
• blink list.

So figure out how to get article/page specific titles and descriptions on EVERY page of your site, and be sure to spend 10 minutes reviewing SEO best practices for title and description tags so you are sure to get the most benefit out of them.

[tags]social media optimization, social bookmarking, ma.gnolia, del.icio.us, bookmarks, title tag, description tag, seo[/tags]

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