A new feature has been added to the TVSA Blogs, which you will see when you either add a new article or edit an old one.
Below the Article Content box (where you write your articles) you will see a new section with two extra fields: a Meta-Description box and a Meta-Keywords box.
The point of these two boxes is to give you the opportunity to improve your rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Live Search, which in turn can greatly increase the amount of web surfers who find your blogs.
Meta-Description
This is a basic description of your article, in which you can tell the search engines what your article is about. Nobody sees this description except you and the search engines.
It doesn't have to be a long description (the shorter and sweeter the better) - here are some examples:
Example 1
An in-depth look at the most powerful television personalities in South Africa, including Mfundi Vundla and Gray Hofmeyr.
Example 2
A recap of Episode 5 of Strictly Come Dancing, in which Ian von Memerty strums a banjo and Sandy Ngema smokes a peace pipe.
The meta-description is often displayed on search engine results pages, so it can impact click-through rates.
If you don't want to fill in a Meta-Description you can leave the field blank - in that case your Blurb will be automatically used for your Meta-Description.
Meta-Keywords
The second field is for you to fill in a few keywords (we recommend no more than six) which relate to your article. They are separated by commas, as in the examples below.
If we use the same examples as above, your keywords may be as follows:
Example 1
television,south africa,personalities,mfundi vundla,gray hofmeyr
Example 2
strictly come dancing,ian von memerty,sandy ngema,recap,episode 5
Keywords help the search engines determine the most important words in your article, thereby improving your search engine page rankings and driving more traffic to your blog.
As with the Meta-Description, you don't have to fill in keywords. If you don't, standard TVSA keywords will be used instead.
Conclusion
Whether you use these two features or not will not impact the way you blog or publish articles - it's all an unseen process.
But if you want to improve the traffic to your blog use either or both of these features. It's not essential - just an added extra which may make a big difference to your blog traffic in the long term.
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