SERP Experts

• 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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Yahoo search normally moves rather slowly with small changes, but I just saw some pretty big shifts in Yahoo rankings, including

• botching part of a sitewide 301 redirect that they had followed for months - now both sites rank, but each ranks well for some portion of the queries
• a bit more weight on domain names

The Alt Tag provides very marginal if any boost in SEO. It certainly is a bestpractice to use Alt tags, but, I wouldn’t rely on them to provide a noticable SEO value.

The most important Alt tag is on the logo. So, you might be wondering, “How does Google know it’s your logo?” Read the rest of this entry »