In my experience of over 22 years now as blog consultant and movable type developer, I've been asked to provide solutions for optimizing a blog for search engines.
Among the solutions I've always gladly recommended, I should mention the search engine optimization meta fields.
If you have any technical knowledge about Web Publishing, you should know that a Web page from a technical point of view is made of two sections: one called meta and the other one body.
While the meta section is mainly for the search engines, the body section contains what you are actually seeing on an internet browser, which means the page content.
The meta section contains a couple of meta tags with information addresses almost exclusively to search engines. Only one meta tag is available also for the Web site visitor in the browser, that tag being the Meta Title (the Web page title displayed on the browser top left corner).
My proposal to you is to have me setup and configure for you a number of three movable type custom fields. You will be instructed on how to discover and embed on your articles Web pages valuable keywords and key phrases. These valuable keywords and key phrases are going to be available to and crawled by Google and other search engines.
This information will not be visible to your Web site visitors just because its function is exclusively to facilitate you to optimize for higher search engines positioning.
Meta Title
By default, movable type is configured to use your article title as browser title on that article Web page. Basically, movable type takes the article title and publishes it as META Title for your article individual Web page.
While this strategy is not bad at all, you may want sometimes to declare a slightly different META Title than your article title, in an attempt to get the most attention you can in search engines listing.
My proposal to you is to have a custom field for META Title, and if you enter something in there to have this something as META Title on the article individual Web page. In case you are not going to fill out the META Title for a given article, movable type will use the default setup and will fill it out with the article title.
Meta Description
This meta description works like a one paragraph summary about your overall article.
While Google seems to not take into consideration this field anymore, there are plenty of other search engines that are still relying on this field, such as for instance Yahoo! and MSN.
You are going to have a custom field for entering this one phrase summary. In case you won't bother about adding it, movable type will be configured to embed there for you the most recent 60 words from your article Body text.
Meta Keywords
This is the third and last search engine optimization custom field I'm going to propose you.
You are supposed to enter here a couple of keywords or key phrases separated by comma, the scope being to have search engines associate those specific keywords with your article content.
What if you are not going to fill out this field for a specific article? In such a circumstance, movable type will check if you've associated any tags for that article and if you did, it will use those tags as Meta Keywords for you.
I'm sure you find these three meta fields worth implementing, but you may be wondering:
- Is there any intelligent way of grabbing valuable keywords and key phrases on a specific topic?
As a professional solution provider I definitely have a positive answer for you.
You don't have to strive yourself trying to think about as many keywords and key phrases that may be related to your content.
Consider using any or all of the following tools. You can use Overture for instance not only for collecting keywords or key phrases but for seeing also how many times these keywords / key phrases have been searched for recently.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://www.wordtracker.com/
Though this technique you are going to be able to rapidly get within the major search engines top 10 positioning on the keywords / key phrases you are interested on.