Quick and Easy Way to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking
You probably know that there is an on-site and off-site optimization. The off-site optimization is about link building. The on-site optimization is about creating a good quality content with your best keywords dispersed on the page. While creating a good content may take days and weeks, there is a thing you can do right away to improve your search engine ranking.
I’m talking about the meta tags of the web page such as Title and meta Description. The Title tag has been the simplest yet one of the most important on-site optimization components for the latest years. And even at present you can have an improvement in SE ranking by optimizing your page meta Title.
The secret is to place your primary keywords as close as possible to the beginning of the Title tag. It’s important that each page of your website has a unique meta Title because you don’t want to have issues with duplicate content. By the way, the keyword stuffed Title tag is a great way to show the difference between similar web pages.
Here is an example of a good Title tag:
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<title>Create and Send that killer HTML Email Newsletter with G-Lock EasyMail</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
The keywords the user types in the search engine are highlighted by bold in the search results. And the meta Title tag which exactly matches the search query tends to be on the higher positions in search results and thus, will have a higher click-through rate.
While inbound links with your keywords in the anchor text are probably considered as a more important ranking factor, the bad thing is that you have less control over somebody else’s website linking to you. On your web site you’re a master of the situation and should not miss this simple opportunity to rank well in search results for your targeted keywords.
The most important thing to remember is that if a good meta Title tag can help your web page ranking a little, a bad Title can bring to nothing the web page’s chances of ranking well in the search engine results. So, if you feel your meta Titles are not good enough and can be improved, don’t wait too long and edit them right away. Simply by including a well compiled meta Title tag into the page source, you can jump a few positions up in the search results.
Along with the meta Title tag the meta Description is a another important ranking factor of an on-site optimization. While the Title tag stands as the main headline of your site in the search results, the meta Description presents the summary of your web page to the user viewing the search results.
An accurate and relevant to the page content meta Description wins the prospective visitor’s favour and makes them click on the link.
<meta name="description" content="With brilliant designs and powerful features of G-Lock EasyMail you can bring spectacular results to your email marketing campaigns and beat your competitors in the business" />
Here is how the meta Title and meta Description are shown in the search results:
If you do not include the meta description in the HTML source of your web page, the search engines will add the description on their own by taking any snippet from your page content.
Would you like users to see the description for your web page as below?
Title: Create and Send that killer HTML Email Newsletter with G-Lock EasyMail
Summary: Home, Downloads, Buy Now, Support, Tutorials
I’m sure I wouldn’t want the search engine to just repeat the navigation links in my site description. And this is more likely to happen if you fail to include a well written, relevant to the page content meta description.
Don’t rely upon the search engines to choose the right description for your web page and take time to include the meta Descriptions yourself on every page of your web site to entice prospective visitors to click on your site listings.
A simple way to learn how to write good descriptions is to read ppc ads related to your market niche. Then you can compose your own meta Description in a similar manner if appropriate. Like a good copy of a ppc ad, a good meta Description copy containing keywords will increase your click through rate and will also help your web site rankings because Google will consider it to be more relevant to the search query. But unlike the ppc you don’t have to pay any fee for organic search results. A well written description will naturally attract visitors and bring you a higher CTR.
If you use WordPress as your blog platform, the plugin called All in One SEO pack will automatically optimize your titles for search engines and generate the description from the first 25 words (or more) of your post. This plugin is a must for anyone who uses WordPress.
The bottom line: the meta Title and Description are still important factors of the on-site optimization and should be used on each page of the web site you want to be described in search results. If you cannot afford much time for SEO, the first thing you should think about is creating good meta Title and Description for your web page. This is your number one task. They will work for the benefit of your site while you can engage into other SEO tactics.
Please, share your thoughts in comments.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribed to my RSS feed!Filed under: SEO, Search Engine Marketing
That not so much a secret as, well, standard practice for any SEO.
Nice article. I strongly agree that the web page title still plays a huge part in search rankings.
The only thing I suggest is to make the web page title no more than 7 words. The more words you have in the page title, the more the words are diluted and the less effective your keywords will be.
Thanks for the great content you provide!
Chris
Magic Professionals last blog post.. What’s New!
This is very powerful - but often neglected.
(In case you rank high enough.
It means you can write your own ad for your site
It can dramatically increase the clicks you receive on your search results, I personally have noticed that this can make up to 20% more traffic!
Mike
mikes last blog post.. Is Pagerank really important?
Great post! I always try to add some sort of “call-to-action” in my metatags… knowing that this will generate more clicks.
Be careful when using Content Management Systems such as knowledgebases to build sites with: sometimes the coders have not optimized parsed metatags… or you get duplicate keywords repeated across pages. Just do a View Source on each page if you suspect this to be the case, and rectify if you can.
Julia - thanks for the great tip. In the situation where you have blogging software, such as Wordpress, do you suggest using All in One SEO to change the meta tag for each page, or is that overkill?
Thanks!
Kind regards,
Dave Jackson
http://www.NetDominate.com
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Thanks,
Michiel
@Michiel,
Please, try to order a license for Fast Blog Finder through our second payment processor company - iPortis. Please, follow this link to order Fast Blog Finder through iPortis:
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I use the All In One SEO for wordpress. I don’t understand why that would be overkill.
Backlinks with relevant Keywords and content will always be king.
I absolutely agree that you must perform on-site optimisation before you can hope to do well in search display, Meta data used to be absolutely crucial to getting ranked for your keywords, but I think that the serach engines are much smarter now and content will account for the biggest part of your position.
But in the end, humans are what we are after, and undoubtedly the display text must engage and be immediately relevant for the searcher. Meta Titles & Description are our tools to do that, but don’t neglect optimising content.
Davids last blog post.. Affilistore 2.01 - Admin Product Count Hack
Thanks for the great post Julia. The meta description is the part that I struggle with. Do you know of any GOOD DISCRIPTIVE articles that will help out in this regard?
Have you have any experiences where changing your meta titles or descriptions hurt you due to SE’s thinking you are trying to game the engines. I think I have even though I was trying to make it a better user experience, but who knows for sure, it could have been other issues. On the flip side I have done it successfully also where it did help.
Daves last blog post.. Surgical Technology Certificate VS Certification Completion For A Tech
One more thing, because the All in one SEO Pack was mentioned.
This project was stopped a while ago and although it is supported again now there have been new projects based on it.
One of those, and this is the one that I use all the time now is Platinum SEO:
http://techblissonline.com/platinum-seo-pack/
It has all the functionality of the old All in one seo pack, plus more, for example support for translation plugins like qtranslate…
Mike
mikes last blog post.. Is Pagerank really important?
word of advice, do not change them to frequently, google will think you are trying to game them and slap on a -30 filter like they did to me.
Good post, I redid mine today! I had been using evrsoft ,and now bought dreamweaver and only just discovered my tags were a mess on all my pages . I think a lot of people set the keywords and title and then forget about it ,, not even bothering to check the source code once published!
And I didn’t know about the do follow plugin , I did all mine by hand , which was a real headache! Especially as now I am about to install my army of blogs!
Also Fast blog finder is excellent , 500 backlinks in for 2 hours commenting! I don’t know how I did without it!
Interesting timing on the post. I am currently in the process of updating all my Wordpress blog title tags using a plugin called SEO Title Tag. I have pretty much ignored the meta description tag up to this point, however your idea to use PPC ads to help formulate one is brilliant!
Patricks last blog post.. Yoggie Gatekeeper ExpressCard and Pico
Thank You Julia, I went over my tags and tweaked a little. still won’t take the weekend off, lol
I get good results not using more then 9 words and 62 characters (spaces included) in title. Try to avoid words like: the, a, for, of, then, etc. If needed use | separating the keywords.
In metatag description I never use more then 150 characters, and try to put the best keywords early in one unique phrase.
Excellent tips. I am now thinking to make my meta description both Ads oriented as well as keyword rich. Hope this will work better than picking up a snippet by google itself.
Thanks you!
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I have managed to convert all the trafic generated from click services to organic search engine trafic without doing anythin else but rewriting titles and description tags. For a non-tech person it takes some time to figure out how to do it in a CMS, but it is definitely worth the trouble.
Thanks for your valuable articles.
Julia,
Great Tips.
Lots of people say that this is basic SEO meta tag development.
But few really do it well and I’m still learning.
Retired Early in Mexico and Loving it,
Joel
You only get 65-66 characters for your tag so USE THEM WISELY.
Thisnk of it as a sign.
Do NOT use the following:
the, and, and more, |, ?, …, of it, by, incredible, best, ***, etc.
They are a waste of space for the SERPS will ignore those characters and you probably could have replace that space with a keyword to boost your rank.
Now if you are an informational heavily branded site, forget what I just said. For example:
“The Harvard Review” –> enough said there.
Please send $15.00 to my retirement fund for this invaluable information. My street address is on my contact page.
Ranking is one thing, getting people to click on your link in Google is another - and the TITLE and META description help sell the link. Keep it concise and avoid ridiculous hyperbole. It’s an idea if you’re selling items to include the price in the metadescription or even the title - even if it’s a rough guide like ” - From $XX.00). . If it’s a category listing page - appending the title with ” - From $XX” is a good way to let the searcher know the kind of price range these items sell for on your site (people don’t want to waste time so the more info you can provide the more likely they are to click).
I’ve found recently that Google’s gotten WORSE at creating a search engine result description if you don’t include a meta description on the page. For example, it listed countries from a currency dropdown menu I had. So I’m advertising jewellery, yet my search engine result description just listed countries! So lesson learned - always write your own meta description yourself in the HTML. Don’t let the search engine pick a “suitable” description for you (lol - as if they can).
I think Tim above had a great point about limiting your words and characters in your title. Not sure how that plays with Google but I’ve seen a nice increase in rankings since I’ve started doing that.