SERP Experts

• Google shows the first 60 to 70 characters in the search results. Make sure your important keywords occur early in the page title for scan-ability. If your title goes beyond 70 characters Google may cut off the title before 69 characters and display … at the end of your page title.
• Rather than making your page title just the keyword and/or starting your page title with the keyword, sometimes it helps to add in a descriptive modifier before your core keyword. This helps ensure your page is less likely to get filtered out of the search results (and thus makes your rankings more stable) while helping you rank for additional terms.
• Page titles are used to draw in clicks from search results amongst many anonymous competing offers, thus they present an opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition and qualify prospects to your offer.
• Good titles evoke an emotional response, ask a question, or promise something (that the landing page fulfills).
• Since the page title is one of the few elements search engines can show searchers before sending them to your site, they place significant weight on the words in the page title. In addition, some people link to pages using their official page title as the link anchor text.
• Overlapping modifiers in a reasonable and readable way allows you improve your relevancy scores for an array of keywords, but they still need to read well. Rather than loading up page titles with a keyword list it is better to write a clear compelling offer that contains your keywords and describes your services.
• Qualifying the wrong prospective clients with a bad offer will lead to a low conversion rate, or wasting time servicing non-clients. For example, if you sell something that is high end you wouldn’t necessarily want to rank for your keyword with modifiers like cheap and discount, as servicing those people will waste your time.
• Page titles should be differentiated from page to page on your site. Unless limited by the size and scope of your site, it is best not to have all your page titles follow the exact same formula across your site. You also should not use the same keyword at or near the start of every page title.
• The format, order, and word selection of the words in your page title should be (at least slightly) different than the words in your meta description and on page headers.
• If you have a strong brand you may want to place it at the end of your page title. If you have one of the leading trusted Internet brands (Amazon, eBay, etc.) then it might make sense to place your brand at the start of the page title. In most cases the page title should still be more focused on the page copy and searcher’s intent than on your brand.
• If you blog or are creating linkbait make sure you try to create headlines that draw clicks by using magnetic headline principals.

• Meta description tags may appear in the search results below your page title. Descriptions should be formatted in compete sentences so they read well to humans. Google displays about 150 to 160 characters from meta description tags in their search results. If your description runs past 160 characters they will cut it short and add … at the end of their listing.
• Each meta description should be unique on a per page basis. If you have a large website you can automatically generate descriptions using formulas to include things like item price, shipping details, or any sales offers. If your site is smaller it is best to edit each meta description by tag, especially on your key pages.
• Meta descriptions should compliment your page titles by helping you differentiate from the competition and appeal to your target audience using similar touch-points.
• Your descriptions should use slightly different word orders and keywords than what you use in the page title. Some examples:
  • If a page title uses the plural version of the word the description can use the singular version
  • If a page title uses an acronym the meta description can use the full version of the phrase
    word order should be changed where it makes sense
  • If SEO Book was in my page title my meta description might include something like leading book on search engine optimization
• If you do not have a meta description tag or your description is irrelevant to the search query search engines may grab a snippet of text from your page to describe your listing. If you do not like the snippet they grab you can either create a meta description tag or edit the part of your page that they are inserting into the search results. After their next crawl of your page they should update your snippet.

MSN Search Update

MSN announced they are upgrading relevancy and coverage. The increased coverage likely means that more inbound link sources are getting indexed. From looking at rankings of a few of my sites it looks like:

* anchor text got A LOT more weighting
* many lower authority links that were not passing weight (due to not being in their index) are passing weight. For some competitive core industry related phrases (not SEO, another industry) I see a site that went from #150 to top 5 based on the anchor text of lots of low authority links.
* fresh links are still heavily trusted, but sites with older links but few fresh links now rank a bit better than they used to in the older MSN, likely due to the more comprehensive index coverage. for as much as Google has beat down some directory links, MSN just gave them a lot of love.
* MSN is still screwing up some navigational queries. For example, my homepage does not rank for seobook. Though I have already seen them fix some of these issues.
* Internal anchor text still counts, but it might seem slightly demoted, as a side effect of more competing pages and more links getting indexed.
* MSN mentioned that they were also looking to get more into universal search.
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How URLs Can Affect Top Search Engine Rankings

You’ve seen it a million times; you even know it by name - URL. You know that URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and you probably refer to it by its 3-letter acronym: “U-R-L.” Or maybe you’re one of the cool kids who calls it an “Earl.” Either way, you may not know how URLs can affect your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. Well, move over cool kids, ’cause you’re about to learn something new…

Let’s begin with the basics so that later, when we drill down into the important need-to-know details pertaining to SEO strategy, you’ll be perched on a solid knowledge-base and primed to follow through when it comes time to implement what you’ve learned.
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As expected early last week, Microsoft announced the “New Live Search”. Todd, Oilman, posted live coverage, as did Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land of the Searchification event at Microsoft.

* Relevance, relevance, relevance. We’ve quadrupled the size of our index, which means we can return the right results for your searches. Improvements like enhanced ranking algorithms, auto-spell correction and better stop word handling help us return the best results.

* Speed. Pages load much faster than before.

* Streamlined look and feel. We focused on the end-to-end experience from the homepage throughout the site. For example, search results are now easier to read thanks to work on typography, contrast, colors and spacing.

* More high-interest content. You asked us for more in Entertainment, Shopping, Health, Local and Video search and we’re happy to deliver it. Read the rest of this entry »