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I have a question regarding meta descriptions.
On pages other than the homepage, the meta description simply uses the post content (I'm using Wordpress). My question is, should I be trimming the content to 150 chars? That's what I normally do, and I even append a "..." to the end.
However I'm wondering if its more beneficial to forget about the 155 char limit to fit it perfectly in Google listings.
Any opinions?
Your description is just one of the sources Google considers when deciding what goes in the search result snippet.
Saying that, it is the most often used source so can be worth filling in, as it gives you a better chance of controlling what gets displayed.
Don't worry about its exact length or if it is different. The key thing is you have the chance to create a great snippet that encourages people to click to your article.
I'd install an SEO plugin that lets you override a default description. Then do that for your most popular articles so you can fine tune that snippet.
p.s. Don't append the "...". Google does that for you if your description is too long.
I think its okay. I don't know if they handle it as double content. For me it would be nicer to write a separate and real short intro with most important keywords that differs from content.
Otherwise you can leave out description on article pages and Google is picking an interesting part out by itself and this part is related to the users search terms, if I have seen this right?!
Also worth considering that the new style google site links lauinched within the last few weeks put an emphasis on the first circa 30 chars of the meta description.
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I created a simple website for one of my clients. I added meta tags in order to end up high in Google searches. However, if I enter the name of the site or some meta keywords, Google doesn't find my website.
The critical keywords that I want to be found: "Orquidea", "schoonheidssalon Westerlo", "Westerlo", "schoonheidssalon"
I uploaded the meta tags a week ago. I think that would be long enough to be scannend and recognized by Google right?
Anyone a solution?
Here's the URL: http://www.orquidea.be
Although the question is off-topic, I'll still answer it!
FACT: Meta keywords have no effect on SEO. Instead, you should focus on generating quality content and getting backlinks to appropriate webpages.
Make sure to use those meta keywords only, that match the content of your client's website. And yes, don't worry about anything else.
Sure, Nowadays meta tags have no effect on search engine rankings. That is Meta Tags are not considered in ranking your website. But before it was into consideration when people used to keyword stuff their meta tags.
This caused difficulty in validating websites for Google, so they used to follow only meta descriptions, content, titles. So always be careful when writing meta descriptions, titles and content. Don't stuff your content with your target keywords. Write simple content that is readable and understandable for your website and sure your website will be indexed in right place for the right keyword...
thanks
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I am the developer of Infermap.com. We are regularly monitoring and working on SEO and presence on Google SERPs. In the past 3-4 days we have seen a sudden steep drop in the number of Impressions on Google.
Can someone suggest me the possible reason of why might this happen and by what ways I can prevent it.
Also I have added around 11k urls to be indexed out of which only 1.5k has been indexed. What are the possible reasons for it?
(note: this question should probably be moved to Webmasters Stack Exchange)
Looks like your 11k new URLs have not been picked up as quality content by Google. You might even be cloaking, when I click on a result I get a completely different text on your site.
Ways to avoid it:
avoid cloaking
avoid adding similar looking pages without unique content, e.g. make sure your pages are unique enough before publishing them
feed new content that looks alike gradually, e.g. start with 100 pages, wait a week or two, and add another 200. Once you are confident your pages are picked up well you can add everything at once.
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Should I slugfy search terms together like cars/san-francisco-california-blue-ferrari or is it better to keep search terms as path segments like: cars/california/san-francisco/blue-ferrari?
First of all, this is probably more of a question for webmasters.stackexchange.com
That said, SEO is not the ultimate purpose of any website. First of all, you should look at making the site usable. If you can combine both that's perfect, but sometimes you have to make choices.
Slashes in a URL generally denote folders, or at least some kind of hierarchical structure. An url like www.mywebsite.com/my/personal/page/ gives off the impression that 'page' is a subset of 'personal' (whatever that may be within the context of my website), which itself is a subset of 'my'.
However, '/my-personal-page/' clearly shows a user that this is a page on the main level, where the foldername indicates that this actually is my personal page.
Whether or not slashes are better for SEO than dashes does not really matter in this case, as long as you make sure to provide your users a clear and easy understanding of your website structure.
Additionally, but I don't have any sources at hand to back this up so you may disregard it, I think that Google and others use the directory structure in the URL to roughly understand your site's structure as well, just like a visitor would.
I can't tell from your URL which part should or could be a folder, and which should or couldn't. You'll have to make up your own mind about that.
Edit:
Short answer: it depends on your website's structure.
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lets say i have a website that i am developing...
the site may have wallpapers, question & answers, info (e.g imdb,wikipedia etcetera)
what do i need to do so that when some search engine analyzes a particular page of my website for particular, lets say 'XYZ', it finds 'XYZ', content it finds 'XYZ' content if it present in that page...
please i am new to this so pardon my non-techy jargon...
The most important tips in SEO revolve around what not to do:
Keep Java and Flash as minimal as is possible, web crawlers can't parse them. Javascript can accomplish the vast majority of Flash-like animations, but it's generally best to avoid them altogether.
Avoid using images to replace text or headings. Remember that any text in images won't be parsed. If necessary, there are SEO-friendly ways of replacing text with images, but any time you have text not visible to the user, you risk the crawler thinking your trying to cheat the system.
Don't try to be too clever. The best way to optimize your search results is to have quality content which engages your audience. Be wary of anyone who claims they can improve your results artificially; Google is usually smarter than they are.
Search engines (like Google) usually use the content in <h1> tags to find out the content of your page and determine how relevant your page is to that content by the number of sites that link to your page.
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There are a lot of websites that look professional in Google results. Try searching for 'stackoverflow' and you'll see at the top a result with a title, a description and a table of 8 links to stackoverflow categories. That's what I'm interested in producing for future websites.
So what must be done? Does it depend on the number of visitors? How long does it take until the results start looking like that?
I think you are referring to "sitelinks". Google generally does not make it public exactly how those are created (to prevent abuse, for example). I suspect you need the subpages to be very strongly linked, perhaps about the same amount or more than the top-level page. No way to know for sure. The best way to get your website looking good in Google is to make it as user-friendly and human-friendly as possible. I think Google typically looks for clues as to whether the website will be relevant to humans and very likely penalizes content that detracts from the interface just to become search-engine optimized.
Make sure that each page (not just your home page) has a title.
Include description meta information, which search engines may (or may not) use for snippets to display.
If an unordered list (<ul><li><a href="http://..">Home...) is used for navigation on the page, Google will pick that up and display it underneath the page listing when it is the #1 or #2 position listing.
Google may also use the description meta, or the first few lines of text that appear on the page, underneath the entry. It usually does this for searches in the other positions.