this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Perchance - Create a Random Text Generator

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⚄︎ Perchance

This is a Lemmy Community for perchance.org, a platform for sharing and creating random text generators.

Feel free to ask for help, share your generators, and start friendly discussions at your leisure :)

This community is mainly for discussions between those who are building generators. For discussions about using generators, especially the popular AI ones, the community-led Casual Perchance forum is likely a more appropriate venue.

See this post for the Complete Guide to Posting Here on the Community!

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Tip: If your title and/or $meta.description doesn't include the specific keywords/terms that people are likely to type in a web search, then it makes it much harder for people to find your generator (self.perchance)
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by perchance to c/perchance
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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.

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[–] Alllo 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Now a few days later:

I first tried 'playin da game' and retitled Beautiful People to be SEO competitive and called it something like FREE AI ART GENERATOR with that causing the title in the tab to look just slightly more like an ad instead of a beautiful thing. And I noticed I went from 200 to 400 views per day down to 200 per day. I believe it is a combination of the title looking less beautiful in the tab and a discovery I will mention later. Next I looked up Beautiful Perchance and was very very happy when Beautiful People came up as the very first result. That is exactly what I want. It may mean basically nothing as far as influx of people via search results, but I love beautiful things and 'Beautiful' being my word in relation to Perchance warms my heart to the tips of my toes. So then I saw how google did not just cut off long titles, (internet research says 50 characters), but also descriptions (120). My description is now 118 and title is 49. If you use a tool to do your wordlengths, you should use BluePower's imo because that's supportive. Which brings me back to what I have noticed, which is that, on a google search, Beautiful-People still shows up on google with it's old title and description as seen above. This then explains why views per day went down instead of up when I changed the title to something that would in theory catch SEO better but looked more adlike. Does anyone know how long it takes for google to recrawl an individual perchance page for title and description changes to take effect on SEO? I have since found what I believe is a happy medium on the title of Beautiful-People which is beautiful for the first half of the title which is visible in the tab and only includes the adlike marketingfeely stuff afterward. On both Desktop and Mobile I can only see the beautiful part.

Anyway, that was my journey in to it so far, with some advice, a question, and an interesting realization that the part important TO ME as far as search results is not necessarily being top of a popular competitive word but, instead, a word I specifically resonate extrastrongly with. Perhaps the same will be true for you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

If you use a tool to do your wordlengths, you should use BluePower’s imo because that’s supportive.

Yeah, I don't even realize that my Character Counter Lab can be used as a tool to determine how many characters/letters it has on an input. 😆

As with the search results, I have changed the description of the counter lab page a few days ago, and yet, on that it still hasn't changed since. Maybe we need to wait for a couple more days or a couple weeks. I've also very recently changed the title to add the (original) part after the Counter Lab text after seeing a copy being displayed below it.

[–] Alllo 1 points 7 months ago

aaaand woke up today and had gone up 200 views just in a few hours during the middle of the night and found it curious. gone up nearly 400 already and it's not even 1pm so i looked on google and sure enough the SEO updated. So IMO it is indeed totally noticeable switching from not caring about seo to making something good seowise. highly recommend. and it seems to have taken maybe 4 days to update on google

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

That's what I've been thinking for a long, long while, and finally explained in a single post. And that's why the AI generators out there have hundreds of thousands or even millions of views, surpassing the plugin pages (and even the welcome page!), that I always wonder, "why do these generators have such long description? Are these 'really special' generators?"

But what about generator pages that has no $meta.description but laid out the page's content or source code as a description in search results?

Now still questioning about why do my simple flag generator can surpass even my full-featured name generator just recently... 🤔

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Checked out the current growth of the flag generator and the generator manager from last Thursday. It was gone from 8290 views to 8613 views today this 11 AM, meanwhile my generator hub page had 16005 views and now has 16375 views. It's crazy to think when comparing these though.

And after some calculating, the flag generator has gained another +323 views and my generator hub page's +370 views, since last Thursday. Still the fastest! 😃 But I'm still amazed how that simple generator can grow so fast that it's close to my hub page. And it's unpredictable whether or not the flag generator will soon surpass the growth or even overtake the generator hub page...

And in the chart, I can see that the growth has been going faster and faster recently, eventually surpassing the name generator. I updated the Generator Manager once every 3-6 hours, and I have almost left the flag generator unedited like a few days, only been updating it once a day.

If you didn't know, the gray one is the generator manager, orange is the flag generator, and red is the name generator.

Edit: Correcting my calculations. This kind of thing is still sort of out of my control, though.

[–] Alllo 2 points 7 months ago

so cool how you have a chart!

[–] perchance 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Note that if you've specified a descriptive $meta.title, then you can use whatever you want in your <h1>, since the $meta.title takes precedence for search engines. So in that case it's fine for your <h1> to be "The Arch Bible".

In other words, the title of your page from the perspective of search engines ("Religion Generator [...]") doesn't have to be the same as the "visual" title of your page that you show with your HTML code ("The Arch Bible").

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

@[email protected] 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.

[–] Alllo 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] VioneT 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I've updated the generators-with-blocklist to add the title as well on the card :). Though it makes a lot of space since some titles are pretty long.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] Alllo 1 points 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?

[–] VioneT 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Updated! Not even sure how much that page is being used xdd

[–] edwardthefma99 -1 points 7 months ago (2 children)

@[email protected] Are private genratiors hidden behind a robots.txt that prevent the massive Google webcrawler from indexing them

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Probably not, they only disallow and allow some Google subpages. Also @[email protected] this could be on a different post/explanation.

[–] perchance 1 points 7 months ago

No, "private" actually just means "not listed anywhere" (e.g. on /generators). If you don't link it anywhere publicly, then Google won't be able to find it, but if you do e.g. post it to social media that Google can access, or link it on your blog, then Google will index it and people will be able to find it via a Google search.