Chez Moncef • How to get more people to visit and follow your Tumblelog

How to get more people to visit and follow your Tumblelog

Sorry for the long post, but I need your help to get Tumblr’s attention. I’ve highlighted the important parts in bold if you don’t have time to read everything.

I love Tumblr’s community/social networking features: liking, reblogging, following and the ability to find other tumblelogs via the Directory, Radar and Map. These features help drive traffic to your site. The day I was listed on the Directory and Staff Picks (thanks Tumblr staff!), I saw a huge spike in visitors, and having several of my posts featured on the radar has given me a steady stream of followers - over 100 now and I’ve only been posting for a little over 2 months!

However, what’s important to note is that if my site wasn’t featured in the Directory, Staff Picks or Radar, I would definitely not have as many visitors. And that’s a big problem. There are millions of people who don’t purposefully go to Tumblr to look for blogs. Those people use search engines to find sites. I want those people to be able to find my tumblelog, and so should you. According to my Google Analytics for last month, less than 5% of the traffic for chezmoncef.com came from search engines (most traffic came from the Tumblr Directory and Radar). Whereas my monfresh.com site (which uses Wordpress) received 43% of traffic from search engines!

chezmoncef.com traffic sources:

chezmoncef.com google analytics traffic sources

monfresh.com traffic sources:

monfresh.com google analytics traffic sources

One of the most important parts of a web page in terms of search engine ranking is the title tag: the text that appears at the top of your browser window when you’re on any given page. Yet, Tumblr only lets you add a title to 2 types of posts: text and chat, which are arguably the least popular types of posts. I realize it doesn’t make sense to have a title displayed on the post page itself alongside a quote for example. What I’m asking for is a section in the Advanced options that allows you to set a custom post title, just like you can set a custom post URL. This custom title setting would only affect the title tag of your post, and would greatly improve your site’s SEO (search engine optimization).

About a year ago, Tumblr made a few changes and added the custom post URL option and the {PostSummary} theme tag to improve search engine ranking. But this only happened because they noticed a lot of people complaining. Why they didn’t implement SEO from day one and why they still haven’t added a custom post title option is beyond me. Especially since the {PostTitle} tag is already in place!! Here’s a quote from last year’s post:

We’ve also added the theme tag, {PostSummary}. This is an alternative to the {PostTitle} tag (used on permalink pages) that will generate a short text summary if the post doesn’t have a title.

Read that last part I highlighted in bold again. If the post doesn’t have a title. I don’t know about you, but when I read that, it only means one thing to me: that I have the option to give any post its own title, and if I don’t type a title, then the first few words of my post will be used for the title tag.

Tumblr claims that this {PostSummary} tag helps search engines index your posts, when in most cases, it pretty much guarantees they will never appear in Google’s search results. Here is a perfect example from my most popular post to date:

example of poorly-worded title tag due to tumblr's lack of SEO

When I post a photo, I don’t necessarily include a description of the photo. Some people don’t write anything at all. But for SEO purposes, you do want a title tag that is separate from your post summary/description. With my title tag for this picture set to “Here’s another one from my StumbleUpon archives”, do you think there’s any chance whatsoever that it will show up in Google search results? Exactly. Even if I search for “sperm spoons swimming towards egg”, which is the custom URL for this post, it is nowhere to be found in Google’s Web or Images results.

There are already several posts on Get Satisfaction on this topic, but mine has the most traction right now. What I would like you to do, please, is help me spread the word about this very important feature which should be a no-brainer for Tumblr to implement. Please reblog, twitter about it, contact Tumblr staff, however you want to do it. Let’s make this happen!