This is part of a series of posts for various quick and easy SEO tips.  A few days ago I wrote, “quick and easy seo tips - title tags,” today we are going to cover meta descriptions.  Meta descriptions are actually quite important because they are among the first thing a user sees when deciding on whether or not to click over to your site.  Again I am going to make my small disclaimer by saying that this whole site is going through a redesign so several of my SEO elements are not optimized (just in case you wanted to let me know).  Let’s get into it.

Meta Descriptions

I’m sure many of you know what a meta description is.  It’s that small snippet of information you see in the search results under the title of the search results.  This is what the meta description looks like:

Did you spot the title tag in there?  Remember I talked about that a few days ago.  The meta description is all that text you see below the title tag.  Now as I mentioned for title tags, all of your meta descriptions should be unique and hopefully describe the content on the page.  Think of it as a movie trailer before the main attraction.  You want the trailer to be enticing, relevant, unique, and short and sweet.  Some of the common mistakes companies and individuals make when it comes to create meta descriptions are leaving this field blank, keyword stuffing, or using identical meta descriptions for all the pages.

Leaving the description blanks means that the search engine automatically generates a meta description for you which may or may not target your audience and in some cases may or may not make any sense!

Look at the following meta descriptions.  The first site doesn’t have a CREATED meta description so Google made one for the site and as you can see it’s not very good.  The content is pretty much nonsense.  There is nothing enticing about it and I have no idea what I’m going to see if I click on the link.

I decided to use my home page meta description as an example.  My description clearly explains what the site is about and what you are going to see when you click on the link.  My title and description will change soon though, once my new site design is completed but for now you should get the picture.

Things to keep in mind when creating meta descriptions:

• Try to keep the meta description to at most 150 characters (google can display up to 160) otherwise search engines will truncate it and add a “…” at the end of the description.

• Make sure your meta description stays relevant with your title, meaning if your title says the page is about “shoes” and your description is about “cookies” then something isn’t right.

• Your description should further elaborate on your title.  So again, think of it like the title for a movie with the trailer.  The title has keywords and gives you a general idea of what to expect, the meta description adds a bit more information and detail to support the title.

• If you include keywords from your title in the meta description then they will show up bolded in the description.  For example if you search for “Jacob Morgan” you will see that “Jacob Morgan” is bolded in the description.  This just calls the users attention to the keywords and may slightly improve conversions.

• Take a look at some of the other meta descriptions that are created for your industry (competing or related sites), try to sound UNLIKE them so that your page stands out when users are looking through the search listings.  Get a look for what their tone is and what keywords they are going after.

• Remember to create a unique meta description for all of your pages, each page on your site talks about something different and should thus have a unique title tag and description.

As in the title tags example, let’s say you run a discount computer and computer parts store.  The sample tile tag we created was:

“discount computers and computer parts | company name”

So now let’s create a meta description to go along with that title.  Something like:

“At Jacob’s store we offer quality discount computers and computer parts for popular models such as Dell, Toshiba, and IBM. Check out our specials!”

This meta description is 146 characters long, has a call to action, is enticing, and tells the users exactly what they need to know so that they can decide if the page is relevant to them and worth clicking on.

Again, as in the title tags example let’s say you have an internal page for only Dell computers and Dell parts. The sample title tag we created was:

” buy discount dell computers and dell parts and accessories | company name.”

So what would a matching meta description be?

Something like this:

Are you looking to buy a discount dell computer or dell accessory? Jacob’s store offers high quality products at affordable prices, check us out!

Hopefully you are starting to understand the process and the idea behind creating solid meta descriptions.  If you have any questions feel free to ask me.

Dangers of not creating proper meta descriptions

• Not capturing the traffic from your audience.  If you rank well for your target keyword or phrase yet your meta description turns users off, then you may losing on targeted traffic.

• Creating identical title tags confuses users (and yes even search engines to some extent) so they won’t be able to determine the most relevant page to click on.

• Creating descriptions that don’t accurately describe or explain the content on the site may result in users visiting your site and then leaving immediately because they weren’t able to find what they were looking for.  When a user visits your site and quickly leaves, this is called a “bounce rate.”

Hopefully this gave you a solid understanding of what meta descriptions are, how to make them, what to consider when making them, and the dangers of not creating proper meta descriptions.  If you have any questions, ask!

thanks for reading and be sure to check out the previous post on creating title tags.

One of my favorite professors from college was my marketing professor Ken Germann.  He taught the class the whole quarter with no notes and nothing on his desk but a cup of coffee, a cigar, and a binder so that he could collect our assignments, you see, he had a photographic memory (or so I think).  Ken Germann was (is) was a larger fellow with a slight limp, but he was one of the most powerful people I have ever met (presence wise).

When Ken walked into the room he gave off a presence that said “I’m in charge,”  people listened to Ken.  In college, attendance isn’t usually mandatory and classes are usually half full, not in Ken’s class, people showed up and they paid attention, Ken made sure of that.  Ken used to tell a story of how he presented a strategy to a bunch of Coca-Cola execs, he noticed that they were tuning out or fiddling around so he said “You are all whores!”  Well the execs quickly perked up and they started listening.  Coca-Cola decided not to work with Ken, but they did end up using the strategy he created.  Ken was (is) marketing.

So why my rant on my old marketing professor?  Because I have been going through some of my old notes and ideas.  In particular I was going over mission and vision statements and I want to share a quick no bullshit way to explain what they are supposed to do (as Ken would naturally do).

Mission Statement

A mission statement needs to have 3 things:

• The value and belief of your organization
• It needs to explain the business you are in
• And, it should profile your customer/explain who your customer is

Vision Statement

You need a visionary to make the vision statement work, every company needs a visionary!  A vision statement also needs to have 3 things, it needs to explain:

• Who are we today
• Who are we tomorrow
• How do we get there

What are some of your favorite mission and vision statements and why? check out some examples here

Thanks for reading and thanks Ken!

First let’s remember that a conversation occurs between two or more people and is a balance between listening and sharing.  If you just listen or just share, you are not a part of a conversation.  Here is a great explanation of a conversation from our dear old friend, Mr Wikipedia:

“Those engaging in conversation naturally relate the other speaker’s statements to themselves, and insert themselves (or some degree of relation to themselves, ranging from the replier’s opinions or points to actual stories about themselves) into their replies. For a successful conversation, the partners must achieve a workable balance of contributions. A successful conversation includes mutually interesting connections between the speakers or things that the speakers know. For this to happen, those engaging in conversation must find a topic on which they both can relate to in some sense.”

I think we are a bit too used to conversations, we expect them to happen and we expect to be a part of them.  Companies expect conversations to happen around their brand and they expect that users are going to want to engage with them.  Why?

Let me ask you this, what do you think would happen if conversations stopped?  We can look at this from many angles but I want to tackle it from the corporate standpoint.  Let’s say your company is Dell or Apple.  You know that there are people out there talking about your brand day and night from around the world.  What if the conversations all stopped?  Do you think you would have a business?  Do you think anybody would buy your product?

If conversations about a company or a brand stopped do you think anybody would really ask about the ROI from social media?  Or would they just say “please make them talk about us again, please, please!”  Conversation is an art not a technique, we shouldn’t expect them to happen we should encourage them to happen.  We shouldn’t expect that users are going to want to engage with us, we should ask them to.

SEO is a topic that is usually on the minds of most companies and individuals.  Everyone is always trying to figure out how to drive more traffic to their site.  A company usually has to jump through several hurdles to get anything implemented and that can usually take months.  As an individual or a small (perhaps even medium size) business you are much more flexible when it comes time to make changes.

As someone who runs a team of technical SEOs and has been in the SEO game for several years, I have a pretty solid understanding of how SEO works, and doesn’t work.  This is the first of a series of posts that is going to cover a few SEO basics, these posts are design to educate and inform, but it’s up to you to research and implement.  Let me also make a small disclaimer by saying that this whole site is going through a redesign so several of my SEO elements are not optimized (just in case you wanted to let me know).

Title Tags

We all hear about how title tags are the most important SEO element to go after, but, not many people understand how to write proper title tags.  Let me also be clear and state that the title tag is but one factor of SEO, and in order to really see results you need implement a holistic SEO strategy that covers much more then just title tags.

First let’s go over what the title tag is then we will go over how to write one.  The title tag is the bit of text you see in the upper left hand part of your browser; when viewing my blog homepage, this is what my title tag looks like, the lower portion is what it looks like in html:

Every page on your site has (or should have) its own UNIQUE title tag.  The problem that I see most companies or individuals running into is that they either leave generic title tags i.e. “home page,” they try to stuff every keyword into their title tag i.e. “web design, design, online design, design software…” or, they create identical title tags for all of their pages.  This is not the proper way to create title tags and you are not going to see the results you want.  So now that we know what a title tag is, let’s go over how to create one.

Remember that every page on your site should have it’s own unique title tag.  Think of the title tags as being titles of the chapters of a book, you want the titles to give the reader a good idea of what to expect.  If your chapter titles are all identical or stuffed with keywords then your reader is probably not going to know what to expect.  Now here are a couple of things to keep in mind when creating title tags:

• You don’t want anything too broad such as “shoes” because chances are you don’t sell every single shoe known to man.  Go after your target audience.

• Think about your audience, are you aiming specifically for a gender or demographic, perhaps you are only located in a certain geographic location?  If so, this information should go into your title tag to improve your chances to rank for your niche, after all it’s much easier to rank well for “discount nike shoes” then it is to rank for “shoes.”  This information will also give more information about your page/site to the users.

• Keep the length of your title tags to around 65 characters or less, anything longer will usually get truncated by search engines

• Research your online competition to know what the competitive landscape looks like, this is just a good overall SEO practice.

• Branding comes second, keywords come first.  What I mean by this is don’t start your title tag with your company name because that’s the easiest thing to rank for.  Start off with your target keywords and include your company name at the very end.

• Don’t bother using fancy company jargon, you need to do research to see what your users are actually searching for.  My team uses its own tools/process to get search engine data for keywords, unfortunately this information is not public so I can’t share it.  I have found that all the public tools out there are skewed and inaccurate.  Having said that you can try a few of the free tools out there (you can just do a google search for “free keyword research tools and you will plenty!) for general research such as:
  • wordtracker
  • google adwords tool

Let’s say that you have a site that sells discount computers and computer parts.  You would probably want to start off with a more general title tag for your home page something like “discount computers and computer parts | company name.”  Now let’s say you have a section for only Dell computers and Dell parts, you could create a title tag like: ” buy discount dell computers and dell parts and accessories | company name.”

Getting the idea?  You want each title tag that you create to describe the content on the page this tells the search engines and the users what each page is about.  It’s really quite simple to create title tags once you have the guidelines down and research your market, the rest is just entering in text.

Dangers of not creating proper title tags

• Pages will compete for the same keywords, this is not a good thing since you want the most relevant page to be presented to the users.  If each page (and title) is unique, then you shouldn’t have multiple pages from your site showing up for the same keyword, the goal here is quality not quantity.

• Not targeting your audience, this is something I see a lot from people/companies who try to focus on terms that they believe will drive the most amount of traffic.  Traffic does not equal conversion.  If you rank #1 for shoes but your site is about cookies, then sure you will get a bunch of traffic but then the users will just leave, meaning you will not get the conversions you are looking for.

• Focus on branding and not on the target market.  As I mentioned above ranking well for your company or brand name is usually easier than ranking for a particular keyword.  If you focus too much on ranking well for your company name but are then invisible online to people that are actually searching for a related keyword or phrase, then you are missing out on a very large portion of your target market.  For example a client of mine in the web analytics space ranks very well for their brand name, yet when you type in “web analytics,” or “web site analytics,” the company is nowhere to be found

Does this make sense?  Do you have any questions?

Thanks for reading!

Updated: Dan Farber from Cnet also has a great article on Obama using youtube.

If any individual or company still has questions as to whether or not social media is a fad, well, this should give you the answer.  When the future president of the United States creates a youtube channel to address the nation, then it’s probably a little more then a fad, don’t you think?

Here is his first address:

What do you think of Obama’s use of social media to reach the world?

thanks for reading!