SEO Mistakes 3 – Page Description

August 17, 2009 by Smoothape 10 Comments »

To round off the SEO mistakes in the META TAGs of your site I want to touch briefly on the Page Description. A page description is a normal grammatically correct sentence describing you site, or a page within your site.

If you do not have a page description on each page, then you better get one. Use a description that is unique for each page and is consistent with the content or copy of that page.

A page description usually run ups to 150 characters, no more. Normally for a home page you can use your company name, slogan, tag-line, or company bio from, say, your Press Release boiler plate.

Of the three meta tags, this on will show up in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). As an example, have a look at the page description that Apple has used for it’s U.S. Homepage:

Apple Search from Google.com

Apple Search from Google.com

Ok, let’s quickly analyze this.

“Apple” – this is their page Title, they Rank 1st place for this on all search engine, obviously.

Next we see their page description:

“Apple designs and creates iPod and iTunes, Mac laptop and desktop computers, the OS X operating system, and the revolutionary iPhone.”

That give a high level overview of what Apple really does.

Now, if you search for “Apple iPhone”, you will notice both the Title and Page Description changes:

Title = “AppleiPhone – Mobile phone, iPod, and Internet device.”

Page Description = “iPhone 3GS is a GSM cell phone that’s also an iPod, a video camera, and a mobile Internet device with email and GPS maps.”

Great examples.

Now, in order to get Google to show the next 8 links, well that is only something they do to pages that are highly ranked, have a lot of traffic and a ton of inbound links, don’t expect them to add those for you site just yet.

Next post – SEO Mistakes -4 – Domain Name

 

10 Responses to “SEO Mistakes 3 – Page Description”

  1. Dan Ronken says:

    Yet another very valuable tip from you Andrew! Simple, practical AND with a great visual example using Apple. Great work!

    “in order to get Google to show the next 8 links, well that is only something they do to pages that are highly ranked, have a lot of traffic and a ton of inbound links.”

    Any idea of how many links and traffic a site would need to get these?

  2. [...] See original here: SEO Mistakes 3 – Page Description | Smoothape – Mutterings and … [...]

  3. Smoothape says:

    Hi Dan,

    Thanks for the comments. As for the 8 love links from Google, I would be hard pushed to give a definite answer on this. I have posted the question with the Google Webmaster, but as of yet, no answer.

    I can suggest that you may be looking at a Google Page Rank of 6, 500+ Indexed pages and 1000+ Inbound links. That should put you in contender mode…..

    Hope that helps,

    Andrew

  4. SEO Rank says:

    SEO Mistakes 3 – Page Description | Smoothape – Mutterings and ……

    “Apple” – this is their page Title, they Rank 1st place for this on all search engine, obviously. Next we see their page description: “Apple designs and creates iPod and iTunes, Mac laptop and desktop computers, the OS X operating .%…

  5. Joker says:

    Greatings, blog.smoothape.com to GoogleReader!
    Thank you

  6. GlenStef says:

    Hi, I have already seen it somethere…
    GlenStef

  7. Goalranks says:

    nice article. thx for sharing

  8. Haha, I hope you will keep updating your content constantly as you have one dedicated reader here. :-P

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