Meta tags for SEO

Search engine optimization is somewhat like black magic or voodoo - many claim to know it, very few actually do. Telling the difference between true knowledge and BS is difficult because of an inherent problem with professional BS-ers - they are who they are in part because they are very good at BS. Search engines do not disclose their algorithms, understandably so, making SEO even more prone to crooks and charlatans. Do yourself a favor and beware of shady quick-and-easy offers. Black hat SEO can and will degrade your website rating by search engines.

Major search engines do a good job interpreting humanly readable text and extracting key phrases, so I decided to optimize the HTML for humans rather than search engines, limiting our SEO to meta tags. Now I need to come up with the "right" titles, descriptions and keywords.

I will start with our home page and deal with other pages later, if at all.

The first big question is "title". It serves two purposes with contradicting requirements. On one hand, the title appears on browser tabs, so you want it to be short. That would make it easy to find the right tab when you have multiple tabs open. On the other hand, it is the most prominent text in search results. That's the text that people see when the page shows up in their search results, so it needs to be descriptive enough to make everyone recognize the website and want to click on the link.

I decided to use the following: Resumendation.com - Let job offers find you. Be visible, anonymously. I am not totally happy with it yet because I do not think it is descriptive enough. Another option is Resumendation.com - You deserve a shot at being hired for who you truly are. I decided to randomly (kinda) switch between those two to see if one is better than the other. Thank you google analytics :-)

Next hurdle is the description meta tag. This one is mainly for search engines, so it is OK for it to be a bit longer. Some say that search engines do not look past first 70 characters... who knows. So here is my first (unsuccessful) attempt: "Where employed individuals express who they really are and what they want to do, while remaining totally anonymous. Employers search anonymous profiles and contact individuals, to describe their organizations and discus job offers". It is about twice the recommend length. Arghhh!

Here is my final description, it is still a few characters over 70 but I am going with it: Enable employers to search your anonymous profile and contact you with job offers.

The last one remaining is "keywords". I will start with a few and keep adding as we go. The important thing is to also include same keywords early in the HTML and then optimize using google analytics. This one is an ongoing process...