A strong, sales focused, benefit led meta description works wonders for SEO. But do you need to use all 152 characters?

No. It’s best to use common sense rather than slavishly create 152 character meta descriptions every single time:

• a short, sharp meta description can sometimes make your point more powerfully 
• make your meta descriptions readable and impactful
• remember to include your top key word for each page
• include your USP – check what your top competitor is saying and improve on it 
• keep it real and relevant, don’t over-promise or you’ll disappoint visitors
• test meta descriptions to identify which performs best
• every time you change a page’s meta description, check its performance (visitor numbers and bounce rate)

It’s wise to promote your internal pages as well as your site’s index page. 

Why? If you’ve designed your site structure with SEO in mind you’ll probably have a fistful of pages named after your most powerful long tail phrases. For example, one of my sites has pages called: 

• seo-copywriting-samples
• contact-SEO-copywriter
• freelance-SEO-copywriter

If you optimise each page for the long term phrase it’s named after, then promote each page in its own right, you’ll drive tightly targeted traffic to your pages.

• when someone wants, say, a fluffy green parrot kit, they type fluffy green parrot kit into their search engine
• if you promote your fluffy green parrot page well enough, your page will be returned high in the search results
• when they click on your link they’re taken direct to your fluffy green parrot kits page, without having to navigate from your home page
• provided the price is right a % of them will buy from you

There’s a second bonus. If you’re in a competitive sector and can’t beat the big boys on popular top level key words, promoting specific internal pages could be the best way to beat the competition and get your site in front of buyers.  

Last but never least, promoting your site’s internal pages helps your site look ’natural’ to search engines, who prefer natural growth based on merit to heavy SEO. Whereas having thousands of links to your home page – and none to internal pages - looks far from natural.   

What is a doorway page?

• a doorway page is designed purely with SEO in mind – a page absolutely stuffed with key words and phrases
• because it is created exclusively to rank high in search engine results, it doesn’t take human visitors into account 
• it will either contain a link to another site or will automatically re-direct you to another site  

Why are doorway pages a bad idea? 

They’re frowned upon because search engine algorithms are written to provide humans with the best possible search experience. Doorway pages take the mickey by trying to cheat the system. They dilute search engines’ effectiveness.  

Are doorway pages considered ’black hat’?

Yes. While a sneaky doorway page might deliver a temporary spike in traffic, you risk a stiff penalty from Google and co if you’re rumbled.

Cheating search engines isn’t worth the bother. It takes just as much effort as legitimate marketing. If your search engine optimisation person suggests doorway pages, drop ‘em fast before they get your business into trouble. 

Powerful meta descriptions and page titles win human visitors and keep search engines happy.

Write strong meta titles

Not so long ago page title tags – meta titles – were crucial to SEO, picked up by search engine algorithms as a key ranking element. 

Today their power has diminished. But because, when marketing, humans are just as important as search engines it is still a good idea to write a goodie. A strong meta title will attract more people to click through to your site.

• meta titles still help with SEO, so you might as well take advantage
• it’ll help your listing stand out above the rest in the search results and encourage click-throughs to your site
• in fact, many people make the decision to visit a site – or not – based on the meta description… so it is a mini-marketing opportunity not to be missed

What should my meta titles look like?

Search engines all display a different number of page title characters. But because Google is still the most popular search engine, many people stick to Google’s limit of around  60 characters. Do this and your whole title will display properly in Google’s search results and your message won’t get cut off in its prime.

If you want to make the most of your page title across all search engines, you can use up to 120 characters. Yahoo, for example, displays significantly more characters than Google. If you do this, make sure that the first 60 characters of your meta title makes sense on its own. That way it’ll display sensibly in Google as well as Yahoo. 

• create a unique meta title for every web page
• use it to describes the content of each page accurately and succinctly in an entertaining way 

Write powerful meta descriptions

Like your page title, your page’s meta description appears in a tag in the head of each web page’s code. Search engines use meta descriptions to rank sites, as well as displaying the text in their search results pages. So they’re a vital element of the marketing mix.

What should my meta title look like?

Create a unique meta description for every page of your website. Use it to showcase exciting and relevant info that you haven’t showcased in your meta title.

• make the description easy to read and entertaining, punctuated properly, in plain English
• ensure your meta description describes the content of each page accurately
• use your top key words in your meta description. But don’t over-cook it or you’ll look and sound spammy

How about length? Use a maximum of 160 characters. Each search engine displays meta descriptions differently. Google shows 160 characters. As I’ve already mentioned, because Google is still the most popular search engine it is probably wise to focus on Google for the time being. 

Install these two plugins for marketing benefits!

WordPress is one of the planet’s most popular open source blog packages. It also provides a huge number of useful plugins.

What’s a plugin? It’s an extra bit of software that you install to do stuff that the WordPress package doesn’t do. 

Some are for fun, others have a serious commercial purpose. Here’s two of the best:

• I love social bookmarking – rather than trying to crowbar code into your WordPress files, choose this plugin and let visitors bookmark your posts in a wide variety of popular social networks including Digg, Del.icio.us and Stumbleupon
• all in one SEO pack – instead of fiddling around optimising all the various elements of your blog for SEO, install this plugin. It’ll make your blog SEO-friendly, automatically 

A great free SEO tool for DIY marketers and webmasters

My business support client, Lisa at letmedothatforyou, found websitegrader.com and told me all about it.  It’s an excellently simple SEO support tool.

Websitegrader measures the marketing effectiveness of your site. The resulting report gives you plain english advice about how to improve the marketing effectiveness of your website. And it delivers a score out of 100 based on key stuff like basic SEO, your site traffic, social popularity and a whole load of other techhie bits and bobs.

You can work through the report, make changes to your site and re-analyse it with webgrader to see if you’ve improved your score.

And you can display the Website Grader badge on your site once your score is good enough (my score for helpinthecity.com is 96.5)

I’ve been on page one of Google for my top two search terms for over a year now.

As you can imagine, being top of page 1 in Google’s SERPs brings in a lot of business. Today my positions look like this:

• freelance copywriter – Google UK – No 2 on page 1
• freelance copywriter – Google entire web – No 2 on page 1
• freelance copywriting – Google UK – No 3 on page 1
• freelance copywriting – Google entire web – No 3 on page 1 

My site was completely offline in early November for whole week because of hosting problems. But despite being completely invisible for seven days it held onto its ranking.

In contrast I didn’t get my personal art gallery site – decor-works.co.uk – up and running again until a fortnight after it disappeared. It has temporarily vanished from the listings.

It’s useful to know that if your site goes belly up for a week it’ll probably be OK. But if you leave it much longer you’ll have a lot more SEO work to do to get it back where it was before things went dog-shaped.

Search engines place great importance on fairness. I can only imagine that the reason my freelance copywriting site retained its ranking for week is because it would be horribly unfair for Google to de-rank it immediately without giving me a chance to re-instate things.

Thank you,  Google! XXX

Here’s a nice little online tool to help you optimise your website for search engines:

All you do is type in your site address. A second later seobugz returns a short and neat report showing you how to improve things like:

• meta keywords, meta descriptions etc
• H1 and H2 tags
• image tags
• SEO friendly inbound links

Once all the basic details are right you can concentrate on great content!

Search engine use words to explore, classify and rank websites.

So how do you check what your website looks like to search engines?

A neat little free SEO tool at www.seo-browser.com reveals all. It strips out each page’s images, colour, styling and formatting to deliver a clear text-based picture of what you’ve given search engines to work with. A snapshot.  

Why bother? It’s a quick and wonderfully easy way to identify whether you’ve included enough words, used sufficient key words, made the most of headers and maximised the effect of subheads etcetera, at a glance, without visual distractions.

Pay peanuts and could find yourself with monkeys.

As well as being a freelance copywriter I run an online business directory, Sonicsyn.

As a responsible directory owner I reject all the usual suspects; adult sites, religious nutters, escorts and online pharmacies. But I also reject bad spelling and grammar, submissions to the wrong category, multiple and duplicate submissions and those that just don’t make sense.

Sadly there are plenty. On average I reject at least a third of all submissions. 

Some, although shockingly bad, are hilarious. So while wading through hundreds of directory submissions is a dull job, there are compensations! Here’s a handful rejected from last night’s batch:

• This website shows you how to get soft, fluffy lips (submitted to the ‘travel’ category)
• Our educational toys stimulate childrens minds without the use of batteries
• Find the cheap or budget accommodations with no rat
•  This websites specilizes in child care and buttock implantation (submitted to the ‘toys’ category)
• We provides excellence customer service and no added value

Hahaha! But I wouldn’t be laughing if one of them was my business. It is damaging in several ways:

• most directory owners will reject nonsensical submissions
• even if your entry is approved it will be meaningless to consumers who use the directory
• search engines will get confused too!
• poor communications reflect badly on your business’s reputation and credibility
• wasted money and time

Just to ram the point home get your laughing gear round this one, submitted a few days ago on behalf of an online lingerie store…

Astonish comes when those underwear for women are magnificently delivered to your doorstep. Imagine your delight when your underwears arrives, it can sit on your face!

The moral of the story? It is absolutely fine to outsource SEO. It can save you a fortune. But check that your Search Engine Optimiser has basic writing skills first and, if they’re writing about your business in English, that they can do so fluently. Add ‘belt and braces’ by checking their output regularly… a cheap shot can be an expensive mistake.