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:

  1. (rare & temporary) The generator happened to go viral on social media somehow.
  2. (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.

  • allo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    8 months ago

    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!

    • BluePower@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      8 months ago

      That’s one of the natures that the generators page 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.

        • BluePower@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          8 months ago

          Nice! Though it’d be better to add some transparency around the URL so people tend to read the title more.

          • allo@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            8 months ago

            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?