My Map of Japan SEO updates and Favicon
I’ve been concerned about how my map of japan wasn’t showing up properly in google, so I decided to do some Search Engine Optimization. Some of the changes are things I should have done from the start, but it’s nice to finally get them out of the way.
The first change was to add a meta description tag to all the places pages. In the 90s, the description tag was useful, but now the search engines don’t seem to pay as much attention to it. It’s still one of those things that people put into pages just in case it makes a difference. Maybe this superstition works, since the same day I started putting tags in, my pages appeared in google searches. Here’s some of my top ranking pages today (no. 1 rank in google for these search terms):
OK, that last one I had to tweak the search term to come up first. I’m happy that the results are finally showing up in google, I was starting to wonder if they weren’t showing because all posts are referenced with a code coming through PHP.
For my meta description, I took the comment from each place and snipped the first 160 characters of it, then just dumped it into the HEAD of the HTML.
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”In Here!”>
Other changes were putting alt and title tags onto the photos on the front page. I still have to change the main database so I can write in comments for each photo, which I’ll use for the alt tags on the places page. I also put in keywords, but they are almost universally ignored, and I only put them in because it doesn’t hurt.
I also made a favicon. The main reason I made one wasn’t about branding, but just to get it to stop showing up in my error logs. I made it by creating a photoshop file of 200×200px, writing some text in Garamond, shrinking it to 16×16px and reopening in Graphic Converter. Then I exported this straight to a favicon.ico file and put it in my root folder. It still needs tweaking (for example Garamond is a serif, where I use all non serifs on this site) but it’s a start.
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