Optimizing titles and descriptions for better search results

Since we provide search engine optimization services for our clients, we get asked a lot of questions about how to improve rankings.

One of the steps we take to improve your search engine results is to make sure your meta-titles, meta-descriptions, and meta-keywords are accurate and descriptive for the key words and phrases that you are trying to get ranked for.  Now … what exactly do I mean by that?

I’ll review what each one is below;

Meta-Title:

When you do a search on Google, the title is what shows up in the search as the link to the website.  You can see the link above has the title of “Search Engine Optimization & Local Search | Web Design Salem Oregon“.   This properly describes what this web site and in this case the actual page on the web site is trying to get ranked for on Google.

More often than not we see titles that are not descriptive, include the company name only, or a simple page name like “Home” or “Search”.  You should focus on the “What” you do and the “Where” you do it.   Titles are one of the most important factors of your page content and structure that you should make sure are structured properly.

Meta-Description:

The description shows up in the search results as well, and in the above example starts with “We can help you with …”.  Descriptions should use sentence structure for the most part and should not be a list of keywords.   Again, focus in on what you do and where you do it.

Meta-keywords:

Keywords do not show up on the search results, but they can play a part in your search results… although recent things we’ve read suggest that the search engines are not paying as much attention to keywords that they used to.  Your key words are just a comma separated list of key words and phrases that describe, again, what you do and where you do it.  In this case above, we would want to use things like “search engine optimization, salem oregon, google rankings, …”.   You can use as many key words and phrases as you like, but you generally shouldn’t repeat them (you could get away with that in the old days, but search engines are much smarter today).

So, if you are looking to review your titles, descriptions, and keywords, you can do a search for the term and location that you want to be found for.  Check out what the top search results are using to get ideas of how to improve your own.  By the way, you can go to any web page and view the page source (the code behind the page) to show the keywords as well.   If you use Firefox for your web browser, you can right-click and View Page Source.  If you use Internet Explorer, you can right-click and View Source.  Here’s what it looks like:

If you are doing your own web site using a content management system or site builder, you will want to look for a SEO or Search Engine Optimization section for your site or (preferably) for each page.   It should look something this:

Getting your titles, descriptions, and keywords properly structured is definitely a positive step to help your search engine rankings.

If you’d like help with your search engine rankings to help you get your web site listed higher on Google, Yahoo, and Bing … give us a call at 503.581.4554.  We’d be happy to provide a free consultation on how you can improve your rankings.