Vanessa Fox. Nude.

I’ve been tweaking things a bit more and maybe, possibly, potentially, things look a little better in IE6. Thanks especially to Bill (I am the last person who could mock another for having a fan site) for his tips on getting my css to beat IE6 into submission.

I also installed Stephan Spencer’s seo title tag plugin. Someone mentioned it in the comments and coincidentally, I was talking to Stephan about it at SES yesterday. On the one hand, I can see the value of this plugin. The title tag is definitely one of the most important (and sometimes, most overlooked) and yet easy things to spend time on if you’re interested in search engine optimization.

I experimented with AdWords not too long ago, just to check it out and see how it worked. I spent so long coming up with the dang ad! You only get so many characters for the title and for the description. And that’s all you have to compel people to click on your ad. It takes a lot of work to write something compelling in so few words. And I don’t know if people always spend as much time crafting titles for individual pages of their sites as they do for titles in ads, yet they’re equally important — those titles listed in the search results, and along with the result description, are all that you have to compel searchers to click on your result. I realize that “Victory! I think!” tells searchers nothing about what they’re in for when they see this page in the search results. For that matter, that title may make it difficult for search engines to know what queries to even return this page for. Victory? Thinking?

So, continuing on with this one hand, I can see the value in the seo title tag plugin, which enables you to use witty, pithy, titles in your blog posts, but useful, descriptive titles in your title tag.

On the other hand.

The title of the post isn’t just important for appearance in the search results. These days, more and more readers are making a decision about whether or not to come to your site by skimming posts in feed readers. And feed readers show the blog title, not what’s in the title tag. So those readers too may be thinking, victory? thinking? do I care about either of those things? Same is true for social networking sites like Digg. Your title needs to really communicate what the post is about to motivate visitors to check out your post. So, it may be better overall to spend some extra time coming up with titles that are equal parts witty and descriptive. I obviously am failing at this; so surely don’t use my titles as shining examples.

But back to my tweaking. I did find where those extraneous meta tags were being generated. And they weren’t so much being generated as just hanging out in the header.php file, so that was an easy fix. I haven’t yet done anything about my feed domain. I admit to being perplexed. If I switch to MyBrand now, what will happen to the subscriptions to the existing feed URL? It looks like I can redirect that feed, but I suppose I need a few minutes to actually read something, rather than skim it. Maybe tomorrow.

Things I’ve found so far? You get more traffic on days you post (amazing!). And links? I don’t know why everyone seems to talk about them mostly in the context of getting PageRank. Links are what’s bringing me traffic. Next week, I’ll do a rundown on my various stats so you all can remember what it’s like to have a new little site that doesn’t rank for anything. Well, mostly not anything…

I saw Dave the other night and thanked him for being my inspiration. Someone mentioned it didn’t count unless I was ranking for freeform phrases. So I guess it counts. Not that I’m worried about ranking. I’m just having fun with you Dave.