For example, if you’ve made a world building religion generator, and you title it “The Arch Bible” or something like that (i.e. something that’s more of a “brand” than a “description”), then people won’t be able to use a web search engine to find it unless they already know its name. In other words, people don’t search for “The Arch Bible” when they want to find a religion generator - they of course search something like “fantasy religion generator” or whatever - so make sure you put keywords like that in your $meta.title/$meta.description if you want to make it easy for others to find it.
Search engines heavily weight the page title in their search, so it definitely pays to have a $meta.title which appropriately summarizes what your generator does in a few words. It’s fine to have something like “Fantasy Religion Generator - The Arch Bible” as your title - i.e. a description, plus a “brand”. Just don’t leave out the key descriptive terms.
I’m writing this post because I don’t think people realize how the “popular” generators on Perchance actually tend to get popular - it’s one of two things:
- (rare & temporary) The generator happened to go viral on social media somehow.
- (common & long-term) The generator’s title and/or description was descriptive, and so random people around the world each day hit their page via a Google search, which can add up to thousands of visitors in just a few months if it’s a popular “topic” that people search for.
Popular generators almost always get popular via #2, and #2 often eventually leads to #1 - i.e. people find it via a search engine, and then share it with their friends on social media, and then at some point (for whatever reason) it goes viral. I think people tend to incorrectly assume that #1 is the main factor in a generator’s popularity (it can be, but it’s rare).
TL;DR: Use appropriate descriptive terms in your title and description if you’d like your generator to become well known. Think about the sorts of keywords that people would type into a search engine to find your generator.
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Note that if you’ve specified a descriptive
$meta.title, then you can use whatever you want in your<h1>, since the$meta.titletakes precedence for search engines. So in that case it’s fine for your<h1>to be “The Arch Bible”.In other words, the title of your page from the perspective of search engines (“Religion Generator […]”) doesn’t have to be the same as the “visual” title of your page that you show with your HTML code (“The Arch Bible”).
@perchance@lemmy.world Do traction from the
generatorspage also really count? I see some new, fresh generators (even the simple ones) slowly gained some views (like 20 to 30 on first-day launch) and I’m assuming they are likely getting the first attentions from people visiting on the generators page. And since updating the generator brings it to the top of the recently updated generators, doing this regularly could potentially contribute to that, since more and more people are likely to find the new generator, some are feeling curious because of the link and thumbnail, and sometimes ended up clicking on it. Thus getting a few views, even when it’s not yet being indexed or the generator has very minimal organizing of the title/description, and after a while, one of the two factors mentioned could also happen.I want to find this out for a while, because people have said that if I want more people to see my generators, I’ll need to update the generator at least once or several times a day in order to get some “attention” from it.
So, in short, updating a generator to get to the
generatorspage could be helpful to hook people from that page to view it and eventually get indexed by the search engine, and then you can try to get into the two factors to get that generator popular.That’s what I’ve been thinking for a long, long while, and finally explained in a single post. And that’s why the AI generators out there have hundreds of thousands or even millions of views, surpassing the plugin pages (and even the
welcomepage!), that I always wonder, “why do these generators have such long description? Are these ‘really special’ generators?”But what about generator pages that has no
$meta.descriptionbut laid out the page’s content or source code as a description in search results?
Now still questioning about why do my simple flag generator can surpass even my full-featured name generator just recently… 🤔
Checked out the current growth of the flag generator and the generator manager from last Thursday. It was gone from 8290 views to 8613 views today this 11 AM, meanwhile my generator hub page had 16005 views and now has 16375 views. It’s crazy to think when comparing these though.
And after some calculating, the flag generator has gained another +323 views and my generator hub page’s +370 views, since last Thursday. Still the fastest! 😃 But I’m still amazed how that simple generator can grow so fast that it’s close to my hub page. And it’s unpredictable whether or not the flag generator will soon surpass the growth or even overtake the generator hub page…
And in the chart, I can see that the growth has been going faster and faster recently, eventually surpassing the name generator. I updated the Generator Manager once every 3-6 hours, and I have almost left the flag generator unedited like a few days, only been updating it once a day.
If you didn’t know, the gray one is the generator manager, orange is the flag generator, and red is the name generator.
Edit: Correcting my calculations. This kind of thing is still sort of out of my control, though.
so cool how you have a chart!
thank you for this informative and helpful post. Stating for benefit of others: Going over mine just now I had never noticed that the title in meta does not show up on the Generators page but it doesn’t. I had been having my meta title match the page name usually assuming people browsing perchance would be seeing it, but they don’t. So it is safe to use a wordier title in the meta tag than the name of your page and won’t mess with how you are seen on the generators page. basically no one on perchance will see it and you should optimize it for search engines
edit: title is visible in the tab.
so too bad mines title in the tab looks slightly less beautiful but changed it and let’s see what happens!
That’s one of the natures that the
generatorspage have, which is displaying the full link rather than the$meta.title. But we could have an option to display the latter, and then put the full link on top as a small text, so it’ll look even more appealing to Perchance browsers, not just in search results.
I’ve updated the
generators-with-blocklistto add the title as well on the card :). Though it makes a lot of space since some titles are pretty long.Nice! Though it’d be better to add some transparency around the URL so people tend to read the title more.
OOOOH I KNOW THAT ONE
i thought i did the description pretty well on that to get people from the internet, tho the title i could only add princess and still have it look nice so i feel the title is mediocre.
for everyone else: have any generators you think you did the title and/or description really nicely for search engines on? any you think it could be better but can’t figure out what to do to make it better?
Updated! Not even sure how much that page is being used xdd
@perchance@lemmy.world Are private genratiors hidden behind a robots.txt that prevent the massive Google webcrawler from indexing them
No, “private” actually just means “not listed anywhere” (e.g. on /generators). If you don’t link it anywhere publicly, then Google won’t be able to find it, but if you do e.g. post it to social media that Google can access, or link it on your blog, then Google will index it and people will be able to find it via a Google search.
