SEO isn’t just about achieving high rankings for relevant keywords, obviously this is a crucial part of search engine success, but one aspect that many SEOs often forget about is the way your search listing looks to the searcher. If you stuff your title tags with too many letters and don’t create a well written, descriptive and enticing description that number one ranking might not be as lucrative as you thought it would be.
So here’s a run down on the elements that you need to think about:
1. The Title Tag:
In the Google search listings the title area truncates at 70 characters meaning anything over that will be chopped off and invisible to the searcher. So, as the title tag is what gets read the most (and initially) by the searcher you need to think about making it look attractive within 70 characters. The answer is not to stuff the title tag with 5+ keywords that end up looking like a mess. The answer is to spend some time making the title descriptive, keyword rich and grammatically accurate.
2. The Description Tag
In the same way as the title area, the description area has a limit of 156 characters at which point it will truncate. So, you need to get your message across in those 156 characters (including spaces). Unlike the title area the description tag does not hold the same ranking factor so keywords don’t play as important, however, keywords will also be highlighted in the description and this can add further emphasis to your listing. The description should also contain a call-to-action to further pull those people through the door.
3. The URL
As with your title and description the URL benefits from having keywords present (due to bolding in the search results) and from being descriptive and logical. The URL listing will give the searcher an idea of the structure of the site and what part they are about to click into. Unlike the title and description it is hard to keep the URL below a certain number of characters and Google will usually remove the central part of the URL between the root domain and the page name.
4. Rich Snippets
In the last 18 months Google have started introducing more and more extra nuggets of information into the search listing which we SEOs can take advantage of. The current supported coding format for rich snippets are microdata, microformat and RDFa. By using these coding formats you can display information in the search results about star rated reviews, people, products and organisations.
5. Branding
Google have given us plenty of clues that they like brands and the search listings are the perfect place to advertise your brand. If you can establish your brand as the one to be trusted within your particular industry then being listed at number 5 in the search results with your brand name can be more advantageous than being listed first.
So, there you go. If you want to hone your search listing even more then check out SEOmofo’s snippet tool. It rocks!
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