Are you a peacock?

Are you a peacock?

Does that seem like an odd title for a page that intends to talk about SEO and attracting visitors?

Well, it is an odd title. In fact, it's a very peacockish title, and that's not because it has a word describing a bird with very colorful plumage. If it asked "Are you an elephant?", it would still be a peacock title.

Are you confused yet? If you are a peacock, are you now a very confused bird?

I expect you might be unless you've seen me use this word before. If you have seen me use it, you would certainly agree that I have chosen a peacock title. If you've hung out with me before, you've probably seen me use other peacock titles and perhaps you may have noticed me doing more peacockish things. You may have thought to yourself "What's up with that?".

I should probably explain. Biologists think that adaptations like the peacock's flashy tail feathers are genetic bragging: in effect the male is saying "my genes are so superior that I can afford to carry around all this useless stuff that would be dangerous for a lesser bird".

The title is a peacock because it's a crappy title for SEO. Oh, it's clever enough, especially if you are in on the joke, right? But it doesn't give a lick of useful information to a search engine or to a potential reader who might spy it in a search results page. The title is useless pretty feathers.

Things don't get any better in the first paragraph. That is also vague, teasing and devoid of information. At this HubPages site, that first paragraph is what will get stuffed into the "meta description" field and that in turn becomes the most likely thing Google and most other search engines will show underneath the title in the results.

So this is just ducky: a useless title and a useless meta content entry. Quite the useless SEO piece this is becoming! How many people are likely to click through to read this drivel?

Oh, right. You did. Well, maybe you got here some other way, but if you did find it through a search, it was probably because I forced the meta description content to be something more indicative of what this is really about. I left the title as is because, well because I am feeling peacocky enough to think I can get away with it and because I can't very well talk about this having a lousy title unless it really IS a lousy title!

You've seen the real Peacocks

I'm not really a peacock. Oh, maybe I have a few feathers to strut, but I'm just a teeny little nobody in the vast jungle of the Internet. I may act like a peacock and not always pay a great deal of attention to SEO, but honestly, that's mostly laziness. Heck, it's outright sloth: I do well enough that I can't motivate myself to take the extra trouble to do it right. My titles are sloppy, I almost never bother to fix up the meta content summary and I seldom do any keyword research. I definitely don't bother with backlinking and I don't think you need to either, but you really should pay attention to keywords, titles and that meta content tag (it's called "summary" here at HubPages).

The real peacocks are the people that get millions of fawning visitors every day. They can get away with anything because people would go to them anyway, with or without help from the search engines. They have so many links pointing at them from so many places that if Google, Yahoo and MSN stopped including them in search results, their traffic would barely drop enough to notice.

But Google et al. don't do that anyway. When it comes to things like Adsense, they have dedicated Google people who watch over their accounts. They might get hand coded into the search indexes too. They are royalty.

We are commoners at best. A lot of us are just dirty peasants. No colorful feathers for us, beause we can't afford them.

No, I don't mean we can't afford to buy something. I mean we can't afford to be sloppy and careless. OK, yes, I can afford to be a little sloppy - I make decent money already. But for most people, busting their hump to pull in even a couple of dollars, carelessness is idiotic.

You are not a peacock. Don't act like one.