Silly Marketer, Title Tags Are for Robots! – Whiteboard Friday

Hey, Moz fans, welcome to yet another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Jen Lopez, the Director of the Community here at Moz, and today I’m going to take you on a tale of two marketers.

We have the SEO, right? We focus on making sure that the robots and that the spiders are crawling through our sites and can get to them. Then when we want things to show up in the SERPs, we make sure that our title tags are keyword rich and our meta descriptions are super enticing, right? We make sure that when somebody clicks from the search engine results page, that they see exactly what we want them to see. And that’s smart, right? Those keywords are actually a high ranking factor. All of these things that we focus on, we work very hard to make sure that our keywords are at the beginning of the title and that sort of thing.

But then we have the social media marketer. Yes, I drew that. I’m sorry, all social media marketers. I know you don’t actually look at that. We think about the people, right? How are people going to look at it? How are people going to re-share this? And so as a social media marketer, we’re thinking like, “How can we change the Open Graph tags so that people on Facebook and people on Google+ and people on LinkedIn are seeing these things exactly the way we want to see them?” We want to see big images. Who cares about keywords? That’s what that SEO person does, right?

What about Twitter cards? You want to make sure that when you send something in a tweet or somebody tweets your blog post or your infographic, or whatever it may be, that it’s coming across exactly the way you want to see it. You’re thinking about rich pins, and you salivate when you’re on Pinterest and you see a recipe and it actually shows all of the ingredients in the recipe. That might just be me, but in general that’s often what we do.

What tends to happen is people are getting better about using the Open Graph tags and the Twitter cards and that sort of thing. But what we normally do is we take what we have, put in the title tags and meta description, and we make it the default so that it’s really simple. So we’re doing the basics. We’re being lazy. That’s exactly what we’re doing.

We do it on our own blog. You go to our blog, the title that you see on the page, the title of the post, the title that you see shared on social network, it’s always the same. You’re going to see it across the board, and it is time for us to stop being lazy because think about if you did this.

Now let me give you first an example — Huffington Post. I recently wrote a post for Huffington Post, and being a SEO myself, I worked very hard at making sure that the title tag was something that would come across in the SEO world very nicely so that it would show up in SERPs great and it would do all this stuff. What was interesting was, that without my prompting, that something that the Huffington Post editorial team did, is after I submitted my post with all of my information, they told me it took several days. I get this email that says, “Congratulations, your post is on Huffington Post.” I did a little happy dance because now I can put in Google+ that I contribute to Huffington Post.

Besides that, the first thing I did is I went to share it on Facebook. What’s interesting is when I shared it on Facebook, it was not the image that I’d used. It was not the title that I’d used nor was it the description. It was very specific to social.

So I went back to my page thinking, “What the hell, did they change all of my stuff?” No, my title tag and images and everything are still exactly the same. However, they’ve set the Open Graph and the Twitter cards to be specific to social. I had this like “Oh my gosh moment,” when I realized: Why in the world aren’t we all doing this? Why aren’t we taking one piece of content and making it so that not only do the robots see it and do we care about the keyword rich title and meta description that looks good in the SERPs and getting all the schema just right so that it looks right there? Why don’t we do that plus we make sure that the Open Graph tags are great, that you have an image that’s super shareable, that you have a description and the title that can be somewhat up worthy?

I’m not a huge fan of, “This woman wrote on a Whiteboard, and you’ll never guess what happened next.” I really don’t like those, but people click on that stuff. You put a different image, a different image here than a different image you have here, and you make it something. You put a circle around somebody’s face in the background. We’ve all seen those on Facebook, right? They work really well. It’s brilliant. You take one piece of content, and you make it work really well for the robots, and you find that happy place. You get the people plus robots equals love. That’s because you’re making your content that you’ve worked really hard at, you’ve put time and effort into this, you’re making sure that it’s easily consumable by the people who want to share it and re-share it hopefully and make it viral because you want that virality here. But you also want it to be stable, and you want the robots to see it and you want the spiders to be able to get to it and all of that.

So my quest, you have a quest. I am doing this hopefully internally as something that I’m pushing very hard, and I would like to see you step up your game as well. So rather than just keeping those defaults of, “Here is my title tag and I’m going to use it in all of the places,” that you’re going to take the time to write not only your title tag and meta description for SEO purposes, but that you’re going to work hard at taking these and doing really great things with your social meta tags as well.

Below, I’m going to give you some resources to specific posts that talk about how to do this well and how to do this well and then take those and combine them. When you do that, you are going to find that people are going to love the heck out of your stuff. I will be the first one when we get that set up on our site, I will tell you exactly how it’s working for us. So stop being lazy, do the hard work, and make your stuff super
shareable all over the Web.

That’s it for today. I hope to see you again soon. Have a great weekend.

Additional resources

For more info on title tags: 
New Title Tag Guidelines & Preview Tool

For more info on social meta / open graph (OG) tags:
Must-Have Social Meta Tags for Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and More