Get Quick SEO Results

Want to get some quick SEO gains? Here's something you can do for your web pages that's completely within your control and can often move your pages higher in search engines results fairly fast.

I'm talking about re-doing your meta title and description tags for your web pages and blog posts.

There's four reasons why you may want to do this:

1. They're completely within your control - assuming you have full editing rights to your site, these two fields are completely within your control to re-write as often as you wish.
2. They can increase your click through rate (CTR) - by creating useful, unique, compelling titles and descriptions, you can boost the CTR of individual pages and posts because more searchers will click on your link over those of the competition on the same page.
3. They could boost your page's ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) - this goes back to the CTR. If what you wrote is interesting enough to get more clicks than the other results, Google usually takes this as a sign that your page is more relevant and authoritative, and will move your page or post up higher in search results.
4. The meta title is the #1 ranking signal - for Google's algorithm, the meta title tag is still considered to be the top ranking signal. If none of the other reasons move you to re-optimize these, doesn't this convince you?

Now that you understand the reasons why, let's go over the best practices for writing these to get the best results.

Re-Writing Title Tags For Quick SEO Gains

The title tag nowadays is generally restricted to about 55 characters - assuming you want the entire tag to show up and not get cut off in SERPs.

• Use your chosen keyword phrase in the title tag, and use it at the beginning of the tag for better indexing.
• Separate your keyword phrase in the title tag from the rest of the verbiage with either the pipe (|) or dash (-) character.
• If local SEO is part of your inbound marketing strategy, be sure to use geo-qualifiers in the title tag by mixing up the zip code(s), city, state, county, neighborhood, etc.
• You can also throw in a compelling offer or call to action (CTA).

Better Description Tags For Quick SEO Results

While the description tag is not a ranking factor, it's still very important for increasing the CTR for each web page and blog post you write.

• You have about 155 characters for your description tag. Again, use your keyword phrase towards the beginning of the tag.
• Use complete sentences, and mix up your description tags with location information for local SEO, and/or compelling CTAs, offers or benefits.
• You can re-write these as often as you like to play around with getting the best CTR and rank boost in SERPs.

You may find writing the title and description to be challenging at first, given the limits on characters, but it's really a matter of practice. Once you get comfortable with creating optimized titles and descriptions, you can rip through several each day and re-publish to get the search engine crawlers to come back to your site more often.

I've had students report good results within just a few weeks of re-doing meta titles and descriptions. Why not try a few yourself and measure the results?

If you'd like to know more about ranking factors and applying search engine optimization to your web pages and blog posts, why not join us in an SEO class soon? You'll be glad you did!

Learn SEO online with our new course for SEO Basics.

And here's an article about the different types of long tail keyword phrases you can use to optimize web pages and blog posts.

Until we meet again, keep it between the ditches!

All the best to you,

Nancy McDonald

image courtesy of en.wikipedia.org