How to have a Clean Result on Google

by Lid

I was recently given the opportunity to speak with Adam Lasnik, Google’s Search Evangelist about search engine optimization, and it started me thinking about title elements and meta description tags; specifically, just how important is it to get the words right?

When you search on Google, the two most obvious things that come back are the title of a Web page, and a brief description of it. Most people will easily recognize a result from a search query.

Title Element

“Google”

Meta Description:

“Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and Images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results and an option to find similar pages.”

What most people don’t realize is that they can write the words themselves, and they should because if they don’t, Google has to get them from somewhere.

One of the sources Google uses to get this information, if you don’t supply it, is the open directory project, but you must be listed there first.

Another source is the text on the pages of your site; any text Google feels fits, including stuff out of comments. This is important, not pictures, not video, not flash; text - and their choice at that.

Write whatever you want, but make sure you use a different title and a different description for each page, because pages are, or should be, different from each other.

If you want your information to come back clean in Google’s search results, keep the characters of your title to less than 65, and keep the characters of your description to less than 160 (when I talk of characters I am including spaces). Most important however, is to make the words count.

Clean:

If you use too many characters, Google cuts them off and inserts three dots…

Messy:

Which do you prefer?

1 comment:

Creating a blog strategy | BlogWell (Pingback), 17 April 2008 16:53

[...] written about title elements and meta descriptions before, but if you want to know more about meta keywords, take a look at Jill Whalen’s post [...]