Skip to content

Neural Market Trends

Startups | Machine Learning | Social

  • About
  • Latest News
  • Blog
  • Domains For Sale
  • Tutorials
  • Groups

Tag: Meta Data

Hacking Meta Data with Blot.Im – Part 1

I’ve been looking at ways at hacking Meta Data with Blot.Im and increase my SEO. I wanted to hack the meta data in all my posts so I can use Twitter Cards and Open Graph more effectively. Why? I get a two for one benefit right off the bat. I get better SEO and deletion of meta data duplicates that affect Google crawlers.

My changes are already having a huge effect. My bounce rate has dropped from the high 60-70% down to the 5% range. This means people aren’t visiting my site and then jumping off, they’re searching, finding my content to be relevant, and staying. All this because of some meta data hacking that I’m sharing below.

What I’m sharing should be applicable to other CMS type of systems as well.

The Basic Markdown File

It all starts with your blog post. For me that’s writing in a markdown format but it doesn’t matter what format you choose. What matters is at least 4 bits of metadata.

What I’m talking about is your Title, Date, Permalink Structure, and Tags.

The Title is important because if you do your templates right, your webpage title should be the same as your article title. This is an important aspect of SEO, each webpage should have a unique title.

The Date is important from a personal organization point of view but less so from an SEO standpoint. Unless there is an important need to timestamp your articles, don’t do it. Who wants to read an old (but great) article that’s timestamped 5 years ago? Date the article for your personal organization but don’t show it in the actual blog post.

The Permalink Structure (PS) is all important. This is something I learned over the past few months. I used to have a PS with the /Year/Month/Day/Title format. It was great from a personal organization standpoint but people could see how dated some of my posts were and moved on to more current ones. Do yourself a favor and just use a /Title convention for all your blog posts, it works better.

The last bit of information is Tags and their use is for internal Blog navigation. I use them quite a bit to let my visitors navigate to similar tagged articles. Take the time and think about your tagging structure. Focus on the main category tags and a few subcategory ones and don’t go crazy tagging your post with 100′s of tags. Tagging does NOT help yourSEO.

These 4 items are something you should think about as you write your awesome blog post.

The Blot Markdown File

Because Blot operates different than WordPress or other CMSs, I have more control in a blog post. For example, at the top of every blog post I have write in those 4 bits of metadata. It looks something like this:

Title: My Blog Article Title

Date: 2016-08-24

Tags: Blogging, CMS, Metadata

Permalink: my blog article title

What was missing from this header file are things like “Author:”,“Thumbnail:”, and “Description:”. I wanted to add these extra bits of metadata into my blog post for several reasons. First, I wanted to show a thumbnail photo when I autopost to Facebook or Twitter. Second, I wanted to show the Author of the blog post, and third I wanted to add a description of the post.

Adding a description to the blog post is crucial in hacking the initial Blot template. The Blot template I’m using doesn’t auto generate a HTML tag correctly, which is critical to good SEO. Just as it’s important to have a proper webpage title for each post, you must have a good description. Google Search uses that description in it’s search results. If you don’t have it, your SEO will far from the top page.

So how do you take a description, turn it into metadata in your markdown file, and pass it to the HTML tag automatically?

You have to hack your Blot html templates!

You can define new metadata information easily with Blot by just adding it (i.e. Description:) to your post.

For your post to properly show up, you must call that metadata somewhere in the HTML templates. For example, the metadata “Author:” is called in my entry.html page like so:

If I want to call “Author:” anywhere else, you have to use . Just leave one set of curly brackets off. Why do I have …? This is a conditional. Without this conditional many of my old posts will break IF there’s no entry for Author.

We’ll revisit these conditionals later.

The “Description:” metadata was a bit trickier because I didn’t define a description for all my posts. I had to come up with a way to drop a summary into the description if I didn’t write one. Luckily Blot autogenerates a summary via the { {summary} } tag.

This is where I stumbled at first, I couldn’t get this to work with our pestering David the creator of Blot.Im.

Hacking your Page Description

Just open your head.html template and edit the fields with the following. This assumes that you have define a “Description:” metadata entry in your blog post (see above).

The reason for the two lines of code is to provide a “catch all” again. I have 100′s of posts that don’t have “Description:” defined in the markdown post but have an opening paragraph I could use as a description. This is where the { {summary} } metadata comes into play.

At first this didn’t work because I was using { {summary} }. The trick is to call it as { {entry.summary} }. Why? Because the “summary” comes from your entry, not anywhere else. You have tell blot where a specific bit of metadata comes from.

The same goes for your “description.” You have to tell your blog that your description is coming from your “entry” and that you defined it yourself. This is why you must declare { {entry.metadata.description} }.

I know this was a lot to digest but it’s incredibly important. Not only for Blot but for whatever CMS you are using to write in. My goal is not to spend a single dime for advertising but write good content and optimize the SEO. I did it before and I can do it again.

In my next post I apply these metadata methods to hacking Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and your Blot generated Sitemap.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...
Author Thomas OttPosted on August 27, 2016December 16, 2016Categories Blot.Im, TutorialsTags Blot.Im, Hacking, Meta DataLeave a comment on Hacking Meta Data with Blot.Im – Part 1

Hacking Tags with Blot.Im

For years I mistagged so many posts. I didn’t have a logical way of adding and editing them. My old WordPress posts were littered with junk everywhere that I had just abandon posts as they were. Now, with Blot.Im I have two great ways of organizing and hacking tags. It’s so simple that I’m wondering why I didn’t start using it right away.

Hacking Tags the Right Way

This is a feature that I just started using and love it from the get-go. It’s super simple and all you do is create a folder with []’s in your Blot folder. For example, I have a lot of Tutorial posts that I want to tag as “Tutorial.” I just create a folder called [Tutorial] and dropped all posts in there. Instantly they all get tagged as Tutorial.

It gets better. If you create a subfolder called [RapidMiner] in your parent [Tutorial] folder, a post that get’s dropped into the subfolder will be auto tagged as “Tutorial, RapidMiner.”

This is a handy feature and it keeps things organized and logical, at least for me.

Add Tag Metadata to your post

This is the old fashion way. Just add a “Tags:” to the top of your file and populate it with your tags. Blot.Im will then generate them into tags. Great way to fine tune your tagging.

What I do

I use a combination of both tagging features. I like to make Tag directories and move my finished posts into them. Sometimes the post will be about a specific topic, say RapidMiner Tutorials, but will have a sub-sub category. This makes it too unwieldy to go to the third or fourth level. In cases like that, I just add a tag to the “Tags:” metadata section and get the best of both worlds.

For example. I write a new RapidMiner Tutorial post and then save it to my [Tutorial]/[RapidMiner] folder. If that post is about using D3js with RapidMiner, I’ll just append the “Tags:” section of that post with a “D3js” tag.

It’s that simple. I love it.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...
Author Thomas OttPosted on August 15, 2016December 16, 2016Categories Blot.Im, TutorialsTags Blot.Im, Hacking, Meta Data, TagsLeave a comment on Hacking Tags with Blot.Im
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

About Me

I’m a Senior Sales Engineer for H2O.ai (views my own). I like to geek out building automation scripts and Data Science tutorials. You can find me on LinkedIn, Github, Twitter, and even Facebook. More info on my About Me page!

Newsletter Signup


Your E-mail

Search Me

Recently Active Members

Profile picture of Thomas Ott

Top Posts!

  • Use RapidMiner to Discover Twitter Content
  • Keras and NLTK
  • RapidMiner's New Time Series Extension

Categories

  • Blogging
  • Blot.Im
  • D3js
  • Data Science
  • ETF
  • Excel
  • Forex
  • Google
  • Groovy Script
  • H2o.ai
  • Humor
  • Java
  • Julia Language
  • Markets
  • News
  • Personal
  • Python
  • R
  • R2D2
  • RapidMiner
  • Raspberry Pi
  • Real Estate
  • SEO
  • Startups
  • Stocks
  • Thoughts
  • Tutorials
  • Uncategorized
  • Writing
  • About
  • Latest News
  • Blog
  • Domains For Sale
  • Tutorials
  • Groups
Neural Market Trends Proudly powered by WordPress
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
%d bloggers like this:
    Skip to toolbar
    • About WordPress
      • WordPress.org
      • Documentation
      • Support Forums
      • Feedback
    • Log In
    • Shortlink