I noted that the two-line blurb that shows up in Google search results is your big chance to “sell” your page to the searching public:

A juicy, “I want to read more!” excerpt is what you want people to see. You can’t necessarily bait every possible “long tail” search phrase with juicy verbal bait, but at least make sure your keywords first appear in a sentence that shows off what your page has to offer.

Did I pay attention to my own advice when making this blog?

Look! Look! It took 1 day to get my Squidbits blog to the top spot on Google, even though there’s a surprising number of webpages out there about “Squid bits”!

There’s just one… little… problem…

Yes, it’s all right to point and laugh.

Lesson: If you optimize nothing else, make sure the blinkin’ title of your website, webpage or blog first shows up in a “sexy” sentence. Probably a good idea to make sure your Username doesn’t have a metaphorical piece of lettuce stuck between its teeth, while you’re at it.

I actually detected this problem yesterday, and took steps to correct it. (Note cute little text box serving no apparent purpose at upper right.) But it may be a while before I can convince Google to re-index content it’s already indexed. A stitch in time and all that!

There’s one other thing to learn from my SEO blunder: while words in headers count for SEO, they may get replaced with “…” when Google shows an excerpt of your page.