Journal - Meta Tags

I’ve still been spending a pretty big majority of my time working on “Audio Book Heaven.” I wanted to post new book reviews every other day throughout the month of May, and it looks like that will be no problem. I had quite a few short audio books on hand, books that I can complete in a couple of days. Still, it’s been a bit of a scramble writing reviews and getting them posted.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on my older reviews, revising them slightly and re-posting them. I’m trying to optimize the whole thing so that it will show up on search engines. That means adding relevant keywords like "audio book" and “book review", as well as using the book title and author name. To get good results, I need to use those important keywords several times in each review so that's why I'm revising them. While I’m revising the old reviews, I’m also adding my affiliate links for Audible and Amazon. I had about fifty book reviews posted before I started all this so the revision process has been kind of tedious. I’m making good progress though, and I guess I’m more than halfway done. I’m hoping to have all that done by the end of May.

In addition to all that, I’ve been looking at some different ways to increase traffic to my blog. The best way to do that is to make sure it shows up in search engines like Google. When someone goes to Google looking for audio book reviews, I want them to find me. The best way to get in the search engines, is to have good meta tags.

Meta tags are part of the actual html code of your website, and they are what search engines look at to tell them what your site is all about. The tags would include the title of your site, plus relevant keywords. The keywords for my blog would be things like “audio book” and the others I mentioned above. It works best if the keywords you choose actually show up frequently in your website’s content, so that’s why I needed to do all that revising; I am mainly adding more relevant keywords to my book reviews.

So anyway, I found some instructions on how to add the meta tags to the code of my blog and gave it a try. It turned out to be pretty easy to add the code, but I didn’t really know if I had done it correctly.

Luckily, the instructions I found, also provided a link to an online meta tag checker. That’s exactly what it does, it checks your meta tags to make sure they don’t have errors and to make sure they have good relevancy to your content. So I ran the checker and my tags were entered correctly, and it said the relevancy was good also. Very good in fact, so I was happy about that.

The stat counter I put on my blog a few weeks ago is working well. I’ve been getting a small handful of hits every day, usually around 3 or 4 which is about what I expected to start with. One day I got a whopping eighteen which surprised me. Of course, I hope those numbers will gradually grow as I complete more work on the blog.

So I’ve been busy, this has turned out to be quite a project. I’ve been staying up pretty late every night working on it andI’m starting to feel a bit exhausted. That’s probably why I was sick last week. I don’t mind though. For the last year and a half I’ve just been drifting and it feels good to actually be working on something again. And if I end up making a little money off the thing, then I guess that’s okay too. I’ll have to give a share of it to God though since He is the one who gave me the sharp mind I needed to figure all this out.

1 Peter 4:10 Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms.

Mark 12:17 Then Jesus said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's.” And they were amazed at him.