I am after some help with the above. Page title is pretty obvious but what description should I use? In the past I have simply used the metatags in the description but should I be doing more or something different? Any advice please?? Thanks
Be sure your page title has a few of your keywords in it, don't load it too heavily it needs to look natural. Page titles are very important in SEO. The description needs to be informative as to what you will find on the page. Some search engines still use it. Don't be too concerned with keywords here, and don't use phrases like "We are the best....." be fairly subjective and useful, this may be the first and last time you are able to draw a potential visitor away from a competitor and to your site (as they view it in the serps). Keywords are pretty useless at this time, but it doesn't hurt to add them. Choose keywords that pertain to the page not to the site. The most important ones first in the list.
A good place to learn how to do your keywords is by your competitors. Do a google search on your chosen keyword, and visit whoever comes up first, have a look at their source and then learn from them > that does not mean copy exactly what they have. Here's some suggestions <title>Minimal Keywords | No ands | Don't repeat.</title> <meta name="description" content="repeat your keywords, but make the sentence logical for a human read"> <meta name="keywords" content="simply, group, of keywords, separated by commas, again use keywords from title and description"> I've also found that adding in <h1> tags using your keywords again also helps. And as adacprogramming said the keywords then need to appear in the body of you page Having a look any high ranking site will always leave you with clues in what direction you need to head... then just do it better.
My advice is to concentrate more on adding fresh content to your website. If you have Meta Tags it something good
Thanks for that. One of my 'competitors' who shall remain nameless is position 1 on Google. They are a VERY small company with very little in the way of content but they are a 'competitor'. They also have a forum that has very limited traffic so they cannot be getting the hits. Is there anyway to find out what hits a competitor gets? Using my 'key' keyphrase they are always No1. Yet my site that is heavy in relevant content is not showing in the top 300 of Google. Could be early days as I have only been promoting the site for a couple of months. However, they DO load the description with keywords for Google and NOT humans. I have done this as an experiment and have hit the pinacle of position 1 AND position 2 on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Not exactly a competitive phrase with just 122,000 search results but the description is heavily loaded with keywords for search engines. I am trying it with a few other, more competitive keywords to see what happens.
Use keywords in the description tag that is relevant to your website. Try to keep the description tag from being to long. Be sure not to repeat keyword / keyphrase to many times.
But this was my point. A competitor repeats very specific keywords within different 3 or 4 word phrases many times and they get ranked #1 or at least very highly for all of them. Will see how my experiment goes I guess
The description meta tag doesn't help in the serps much so pixel1 has the right idea, make this appealing to the reader, don't worry about the search engines there. Keywords should be repeated in the body of the page, don't get too carried away there either, but they should be used in different phrases, put in H1 tags, especially in the first and last paragraphs of the page. This will make a difference in how you rate in the SERPs
Ok thanks for that. I have found that the keywords in the body of a specific page doesn seem to do much at all to be honest. I am sure that, in time, that this will have an impact but through the Title, Description and Meta tags I have achieved #1 on the 'Big 3' with NO keywords or phrases in the body text.
Meta-description is important because it is the one will be featured mostly on search result pages. How you describe about your site will determine your placement. I might be out of my limb here, but anyone else has totally ignored the meta-keywords like I do?