Silly Marketer, Title Tags Are for Robots!

Like all good marketers, we think carefully about our title tags before publishing new content. Then we just take that carefully crafted title and plop it into the OG tags for social shares, right?

In today's Whiteboard Friday, Jen Lopez explains why we need to put in a little more effort than that.


                          

Video transcription:

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.

http://moz.com/blog/silly-marketer-title-tags-are-for-robots