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.

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

    @perchance@lemmy.world Do traction from the generators page 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 generators page 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.