SEO Mistakes 3 – Page Description
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
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 = “Apple - iPhone – 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
