In part one of "The UV SEO Series", I introduced the series. In part two, I wrote about having one website address. In part three, I wrote about internal linking strategies. Today, I'm going to emphasize meta descriptions and meta tags.
What the Search Engines Index
Google, the 1000-pound gorilla in the search engine market, indexes each page of a website using an algorithm known only to Google. Through observation, however, we know that Google looks at titles wrapped in the "h" tags (h1, h2, etc.), the slugs (the unique parts of URLs), words wrapped by the strong and bold tags, and the first 100-150 characters of the content. Google pays little attention to meta keywords, drawing the keywords from the content itself. Google also pays little attention to the meta description, unless there aren't 100-150 words of content (such as only having embedded videos or images). Of course, links are followed or "nofollowed", depending on what's in the content.
Google isn't the only player in town, so it's ridiculous to place all of your search engine faith in them. Yahoo still has a decent market share and other players are out there, just waiting to fill any void.
Yahoo looks at all the ingredients that Google does and adds meta descriptions and meta keywords to the mix. When I started adding tags to my blog posts, it didn't make much of a difference. When I started using a plugin to copy each post's categories and tags to the meta keywords, it made a huge difference. I use the same plugin to copy the excerpts of 150 words to my meta descriptions.
Quantifiable Differences
Prior to concentrating on meta descriptions and meta keywords, maybe 5 percent of my traffic came from Yahoo and the rest from Google. A pie chart of the last 72 hours shows me that 73 percent comes from Google, 20 percent from Yahoo and the rest from the other search engines. I'm starting to see players like MSN/Live, Alta Vista, and even AOL poke their heads in.
Overall, since I started tracking the SERPS, Google has only garnered 67 percent of the market share as far as this blog is concerned. That's 33 percent of the searches coming from someone else. Doesn't it make sense to attract that 33 percent as well?
Manipulate the Meta
If you have control over your meta description and meta keywords, use your head and fill them in with the appropriate information. Make sure they're both related to the content. If you can't get your keywords into the first 150 characters of the content, get them into the meta description. If you CAN get them into the first 150 characters, you can simply copy the first 150 characters to the meta description and be done with it.
I have no doubt in my mind that I've hit the first page of Google and Yahoo for single keywords multiple times due using to the meta information the way it's intended to be used. This was using onsite SEO only.
Coming in Part Five
I have to take a day or two off from writing in order to take care of personal business. When I return, I plan to write about keyword placement and keyword density and how easy it really is to manipulate both.
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