Description for site and needed keywords to be found in search

Looking through Webmaster the only keyword tied to the site is pretty much only slant, which can be good for those that already know the sites name, but for those that are looking for Q&A sites will most likely not find us.

What I am proposing is a brief description of the site on our front page, (that can get crawled and added to our keywords) that way we can start getting listed under certain keywords that we feel will direct the traffic we are looking for towards us. It will also have the benefit of describing the site to new users who do not know what the site is.

We have seen how this works for individual questions on the site so how about doing it for the site, its name and its description now too?

Wouldn’t this partly be taken care of by using meta tags?

While Slant is pretty self explanatory, it would at least be nice to provide users with a reference for best practices. As far as I know, there isn’t a way for them to learn basic rules like avoiding the word “you”.

I don’t know that meta tags are meaningful anymore. Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking

I am unsure if Slant is really self explanatory. If I showed my mother or my Grandmother the site I can guarantee they would have no idea what it is for or how to use it. While of course those that are more tech literate like us it does seem more obvious, but I still think a simple description on the front page would be helpful for all. And yes we could really use a place to have our posting guidelines that can be pointed to when needed.

Though after discussing this issue with Andris I am wondering if it would be good to hold off on our brand and SEOing the site as a whole until things are more feature complete and we can do a real push to get the sites name and brand recognition known by presenting the full finished product. Of course this does make it harder to do the individual question SEOing that we are doing now as we do not have any brand or easy outlines of what the site is to point to. So maybe it would be best to stay undecided of what our keywords would be (by not having a description up yet) or push for them to be scraped until we have a finished product to present?

Basically I am torn, anyone with some more thoughts on this?

I only just discovered slack this afternoon via finding it through a search for ‘wunderlist vs todoist’, slack currently ranks #2 for this search.

I will introduce myself, I am an SEO and Content Marketing consultant. I have recently started my own business. As this is my primary occupation, I would love to provide what insights I am able to on the topic.

As I am a new member I will reserve my suggestions for now (I have forwarded them to @StuartK via email as he asked via twitter)