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FABulous tip, @Kirsi Dahl! Making your content more easily read by search engines helps not only with SEO for the web, but also for searches within Substack. It's just good practice. I know I love little amusing or ironic titles, but search engines are unimpressed. If you want to keep those, it's always good to add clear facts to the descriptive information on the Settings page and in the "SEO-settings" specifically.

One nifty trick I still use all the time was taught to me by one of our developers a long time ago. Facebook as a "sharing debugger" too for developers that allows you to preview what a post looks like when shared on Facebook. The trick is that it simply pulls the preview data out of standard fields so it really works for anything that uses basic formats. Log into your Facebook account, then go to https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/... as an example see what this article looks like here: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fkirsidahl.substack.com%2Fp%2Fmake-your-ancestors-findable-seo

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This will be helpful! Regarding clever titles and SEO: My friend Paula had the same comment as you: clever isn't what Google is looking for. It requires a very "utilitarian" naming approach. Thanks Barbara!

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You bet! During the leaner days of my startup career, I had a side hustle writing SEO articles for a professional SEO content firm. (I think AI has consumed this business, by the way.) These guys were good and the process taught me to recognize that before your writing reaches your customer you have to get past the search engines. These details matter!

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🤯 Thank you @kirsidahl for sharing this! Im brand new to Substack so I can’t wait to give it a try with my first post! I’m not tech savvy so you just blew my mind! 🙏😊

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ooh, that's great news! Welcome to Substack and our genealogy community! I can't wait to read what you have to say!

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Google's continual changes to search are so frustrating for me. Hopefully adding clear SEO will help surface those cozy family history blogs I love.

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Great information! I have my weekend project!

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I use tags, and I try to pay attention to alt text (for our visually impaired friends) but I didn't know about the SEO tips.

So much to learn!

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Kirsi, I assume you are talking about the tags? I always use them but need to do a better job with them. Thanks for the post.

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I was thinking of alt text when I responded; but perhaps that is not what she was referring to? 😬

I too use tags on my posts. To be honest though, I haven’t seen the benefit of it except for my own sorting and organizing purposes. Is there more to it?

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Keywords are important. I just try to find out the right ones. Here is a post I ran into about SEO and substack. https://www.tella.tv/definition/seo-settings

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I've seen all tags being used but didn't know that's what they are called or how to make them.

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Most people skip them. To be honest, I have not been good at it but moving forward I plan to be better! Every little bit helps!

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Thanks for the restack!

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