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

Your name here

Millions of sites on the internet have one thing in common, they are not optimized for SEO. Over the next few posts I’ll ask you to look at your own site to make sure you are doing all you can to optimize your site.
This is simple stuff, all you will need is access to your webpage to make some changes.

1. Your Page Title.

a. Your Page title is best to be kept below 70 characters, anything more and it will be truncated by Yahoo, Bing or Google.
b. The first word in your title holds 50% of the authority of the entire title, so make sure it is a great word, you would think to put in your company name here, but that is a rudimentary mistake most people make. Take the example of a company called BattPlus, selling cell phone batteries.

instead of a title such as – BattPlus

Change it to – Cell Phone Batteries – Battplus

c. Page titles should not be the same for all pages in your site. Add as much variation as possible. Optimize the title tag for the page contents.

e.g. A Page talking specifically about replacement iPhone Batteries should have a title tag like this

iPhone Replacement Batteries – BattPlus

d. Spacing. This has been debated, but using spacing in the title is no problem, using ‘|’ is ok, as is, “_” or “-”. Just remember they are all considered a character, and eat into that 70 character limit. Also, title tags are not case sensitive.

Next Post – SEO Mistakes 2 – Keywords