Mind Mapping ? Meta tags ?

[capricornjack83]

What exactly is mind mapping ? And, I'm not sure how to get good meta tags and exactly what they do, can anyone help ?

[rjleaman]

I brought up the question of mind mapping in this thread:

Originally Posted by rjleaman

You know how sometimes you have so many ideas in your head, it can be hard to get them out and get them organized? ...Basically, to make a mind map, you just start with putting down one central idea and then cluster all sorts of related ideas around it, figuring out the relationships between the ideas with circles and arrows and whatever other kind of notation makes sense to you.

As for meta tags, if you look at the source code of just about any web page (View > Page Source if you're using Firefox browser, something similar in IE) you'll see a bunch of tags in the header part of it. The ones that say meta are the meta tags.

For this page, for example, the meta tags look like this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
<meta name="generator" content="vBulletin 3.6.4" />

<meta name="keywords" content="Mind,Mapping,Meta,tags,Mind Mapping ? Meta tags ?, blog forum,  blogger forum, blogging forum, blog forums, blogs forum" />
<meta name="description" content="What exactly is mind mapping ? And, I'm not sure how to get good meta tags and exactly what they do, can anyone help ?" />

The first one tells the browser what character set to use in rendering the page (as opposed to Cyrillic alphabet or Chinese characters, etc) and the second one tells us that vBulletin is the software that generated the page. Of more interest to bloggers are the next 2 meta tags - keywords and description. Search engines read these tags and some of them use the tags to help serve up your page in results. They're not relying on meta tags as much as they used to do, but still use them to some extent... no one knows exactly how much.

Meta tags are usually generated automatically by your blogging software, but they can be tweaked to work to greater advantage. On a Blogspot blog like yours, you can't take advantage of all the cool SEO plugins that exist for WordPress, so you'll have to do any meta tag tweaking by hand. I would say not to make meta tags a big priority, because there are many more useful things you can do to help your blog. But there's no harm in playing with them, if you've got time to spare.

[capricornjack83]

Thank you so much for explaining that to me, I had a very general understanding before, now I have a much better understanding of it all. You've been so helpful, and I really appreciate that.

Joseph's World

[Chelle B.]

I actually just added meta tags manually to my Blogger blogs' html last night, so I'll be curious to see if it does any good with increasing organic traffic.

[Nahualli]

I use mind mapping when trying to coordinate with the other writers in my blog to cover an event or program activities/features. It works wonders to give structure to the mess in your head!