The Importance of Setting Your Site Meta Information
Hey there!
When I first started building sites, I didn't think that filling in title and other meta information was important.
One reason for me feeling this way was because I didn't know how to do it. The second reason was that I figured it was ok to let Google fill the information out for me once it crawled my site. Big mistake!
The good thing about building your site here on WA is that it will come pre-loaded with an awesome plugin that takes care of this for you. All you have to do is fill in the information and it takes care of the rest.
Why Do You Want To Fill Your Meta Information Yourself?
As we go about building our sites and getting them ranked in Google, we tend to forget that Google is a machine. It's not human and it's not perfect.
That being said, it will make mistakes. It will index your site wrong especially if words/phrases have ambiguous definitions.
For instance, consider the following. If you have an organic foods site and you're talking about cooking/baking with flour, Google might think you're talking about organic flowers instead.
Also, you should remember that your site is for people not Google. If Google fills out your information wrong, when someone comes along to read your description that makes no sense, they're not going to give your site the time of day.
What To Do If You Need To Fill Out Your Meta Data?
It's ok if you haven't been filling this out. Going forward, you need to make sure to take the extra couple of minutes to fill in meta title AND meta description information for ALL of your pages and posts.
If you have a lot of articles and pages, depending on your working style you have two options:
- Make the changes all one time.
- Make changes to one page or post one day at a time.
I like to work in marathons, so when I first found this out I just set at the computer with a big cup of black coffee and pulled an all-nighter to fix everything.
This might not work for you. You might want to take a more sane approach by filling in a couple at a time over a number of days.
There's no right or wrong answer here, just make sure you get them done.
What To Do As You Make These Changes
Depending on how much changes need to be made you can wait to do this or do this over time.
Hopefully you know what your sitemap is. If not, your sitemap is pretty much like a table of contents for your site that Google uses to take notes.
As you start knocking out several pages/posts at a time, you are going to need to resubmit your sitemap.
Do this once or twice a week. No more than that.
If you need more information about how to go about editing your Meta Information, this training shows you everything you need to know:
How To Setup Your Site Meta Title, Meta Description and Other Meta Information
I hope this helps. If you have any questions, comments or other feedback, please leave them in the comments box below.
Take care!
Marlinda
Recent Comments
10
This is good. I too realized how important using meta keywords is for your web pages. Take the couple of minutes to do it. It makes a difference.
Wow this is really helpful. Will be referring back to this in a bit. Thanks for the info!
See more comments
Making the same mistake not filling the meta description out,but a plus for me realizing I had to find out if this was important
and OH Boy .........sure is
Thanks Marlinda