Add Meta Keywords and a Description to Your Post

When you need to know something, what's the first thing you do? You Google it! But how does Google know what sites to bring up? Along with a complex algorithm, they use your Metadata. Let's talk about Metadata and how you can add it to your blog.

What Is Metadata 

Metadata is data about your site. Each page and post on your blog has data that tells Search Engines what's on your page. When someone searches, Google uses this data (and much more) to bring up the most reliable pages to answer the search query. You can add Meta Keywords and Meta Description to your post to help Google bring up the right information for the person searching.

Meta Keywords

Google had devalued keywords recently. Some bad apples would stuff their site with valuable keywords to help their site rank higher in search results. It is unclear what weight keywords have in Google’s algorithm but it is still good to have them. We recommend long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are more like sentences about your blog post. They include things like “How to create a get well card” or “How to cook a steak”. Long tail keywords are helpful because more and more people are using Google Voice Search to find information instead of typing it in. (Hey Google!)

Meta Description

This is the description that shows under your post title and URL in Google. It shows a brief description of what the page is about. If the keywords searched for are in the post, Google will highlight it here. This can be generic for you whole blog and detailed for each blog post and page. 

Add Metadata To Your Blog

There are two different places in Typepad you can add Metadata. The first is an overview of the blog itself and the second is for each post or page.

Add To Your Whole Blog 

Search Engines want to know what your blog is about. This Metadata shares with them the keywords and description for your blog on a whole. You can update this as your blog evolves.

From the Settings tab, click on the SEO tab on the left. Here you can add Meta Keywords and Meta Description for your whole blog.

Add To Your Individual Blog Posts and Pages

When you create a post or a page, you can add more customized Metadata that drills down what the particular post or page is about. Make sure to use keywords and phrases that show up in the post.
From the Compose page, scroll down to Keywords. Here you will enter your Keywords for the post. The Excerpt is where you will put a brief description about the post. Make sure to use as many of the keywords you can but sound natural as well.

A Quick Word About Google

You may spend some time crafting the perfect description for your blog, blog post, or page. You use the correct keywords and your readers can easily understand the description. Then you do a quick Google search and that doesn’t come up. Well, Google will do what it wants to sometimes.

First, if you recently published the page, Google may not have crawled it yet. They will use the first paragraph on the post or your blog description. You will need to wait for Google to crawl your page and update their information. If you are updating older posts or pages, you can ask Google to recrawl your page through Google Search Console.

Second, Google wants to showcase the search terms used. If your meta description does't have it, they will use text in the post that does have it. This is to show the searcher your post has the keywords they are looking for.

A great way to view what Google shares is to just search your site. To search just your site add site: before your domain.

Example: site:everything.typepad.com

Tip: You don’t need to add https or www.

Not sure which posts are popular or not? Add Google Analytics to your blog and let them do the tracking.

Here you'll see the description that shows when your post comes up without keywords. If your blog is older, you may have a few pages to review. We recommend starting with your least popular posts. If you add Keywords and a Description does it impove the page views?