Description Tags- Who's in the Driver's Seat?

The last post was on Description Tags - 7 Quick Steps to Success.  While that post covered some basic things to make the most of your description tag it would be good to cover/emphasize another thought that could have an impact on the success of your description tags.

#1 Question:  Hey, we did everything you said to optimize our description tags & Google is showing a lame strange snippet from our site- What's going on?

Good question.  Here's the answer in short:  Google may totally disregard your hard work in creating compelling description tags and put whatever they want there.  Why?

Google's number one goal is to return the most relevant results to their audience, and because of this they may pull content from other portions of your page to better match the keywords used in the searcher's query.  Think about it- If you have a page on your that talks about gluten-free pasta you can likely only target one or two keyword phrases message in your description tag such as "gluten-free pasta" or "wheat free pasta".  Likely if the searcher types in those keywords the description tag you wrote will come up.  But if they type in "gluten-free spaghetti" Google may crawl that page and see that you indeed do have that phrase on the page and put together their own description tag/snippet to best match the searcher's query.  Here is Google's description with underlining and bolding added by us:

"Google's creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web.

We use a number of different sources for this information, including descriptive information in the META tag for each page. Where this information isn't available, we may use publicly available information from DMOZ. While accurate meta descriptions can improve click through, they won't impact your ranking within search results. We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL's content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

While we're unable to manually change titles or snippets for individual sites, we're always working to make them as relevant as possible. You can help improve the quality of the snippets displayed for your pages by providing informative meta descriptions for each page."

What does this mean for you?

Does this mean you should just give up and not write meta descriptions?  No because in many cases Google will show your description for the search query.  But if they don't it basically comes down to what you should be doing already.  Having great content on your page, perhaps having keyword variations and well written copy so that if Google does show something different it will still be relevant.

More information on meta descriptions/snippets and how they work:

Excellent article by Ken Lyons:  Meta Description Mutiny! Take Control of Your Text Snippets

Official Google Video with Matt Cutts discussing descriptions/snippets:

Description Tags - 7 Quick Steps to Success

Your meta description tag is a valuable part of optimizing your site for Google that is often overlooked.  A description tag is basically a snippet of information on each page of your site that shows up in the search results below the heading of each search result (see picture below). The description tag does not show up on the actual page of your site in its readable text but rather is something that you enter for each page on the site.  At this time the length of the description tag shown by Google is 150 characters.

Best practices for description tags:

1.  Unique description tag for each page on your site. 

2.  Use each page as a chance to rank on Google for a phrase. 

3.  Use your target keyword(s) phrase in your description tags, preferably toward the beginning. 

4.  Use your targeted keyword phrase once, perhaps fitting in secondary phrases if possible.

5.  Use this tag to continue to interest the reader and give them extra reasons for clicking on your listing.  Think of this tag as valuable "real estate"- like a billboard that you can use to your advantage to get more clicks than you're competitor even if they are above you in the search results.

6.  Keep the description under the above amounts of characters to make your message complete and not trail off...

7.  Know that Google will not always use your description tag in the search results- see the following article:
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2009/11/19/meta-description-mutiny

Additional Links: 

Google's page on what they look for in the meta description tag and how best to optimize it:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35264

Click to call- Useful New Feature for Advertisers?

With the advent of the game-changing iphone and its app store Smartphone morphed from being something used by techies and corporate types to a truly fun & usable device that everyone wants.   Add to this the popularity of the Blackberry and Google's new operating system and you have a fast growing segment of the mobile phone market that are heavy users of the internet.  This segment makes up about 15% off all mobile phones in the U.S., or about 50 million smart phones.  

Mobile device makers such as Apple are trying to get advertising revenue from all these eyeballs by putting together new advertising platforms such as iAd.  Google has recent release their Click to Call phone extensions for Adword advertisers.  What's the basic idea behind this and how do you put it to work for your business or clients?

According to Google, "Phone extensions are a type of ad extension, an ad feature that allows advertisers to add additional information about their businesses and offering to their text ads. In the case of phone extension, this additional information is your business phone number, which can be accessed directly from the ad with a single click on a user's high-end mobile device.

Phone extensions will appear as clickable phone numbers beneath the main text ad, and will be visible to high-end mobile device users who access Google.com search, Voice search, Google Mobile App or Google Maps for Mobile from their phone."

Check out the picture to the right to see what it looks like to a person searching on your site.  To find out how to completely set up Click to Call, go to the Google Inside Adwords Blog. 

Why Click to Call?

Think about it.  You're surfing on your mobile phone and you search for say, "pizza", or "electrician", or even "travel agent".  With the new Click to Call feature you're going to see that phone number in an advertiser's sponsored results PPC ad.  By having a phone number right in that ad that calls the business it makes for s seamless and easy experience for the searcher, more money for Google and possibly more business for you or your client. 

In addition, Google has rolled this feature out nationwide not only for local advertisers but for national advertisers.

Does it Work?

According to a Google spokesperson, on average, advertisers who participated in the original Click-to-Call beta saw very positive results, ranging from a 5 to 30 % increase in click-through rates.  But we'll just have to see over the next few months how this is working out for advertisers.

Final Thoughts

The idea that anyone with an iPhone, Android phone or other phone can just search and quickly click your ad to call you is interested because it kind of goes along with the thought of how people use smart phone differently than a regular computer.  Also, it's interesting that by searching, seeing your ad and clicking the number to call totally bypasses your website. 

Like a lot of things in advertising, learning, researching your potential clients, writing relevant ads with relevant keywords and just trying it out and carefully tracking results to see if this is for your business is a great way to see if this new feature is for you.

AdWords Quality Score Myths and Facts

This will be a quick post:

You don't have to look far to find all kinds of conflicting ideas on Google Adwords, especially when it comes to Quality Score.  What's true?  What's false?  Wouldn't it be great if someone from the Googleplex could give us a few answers? 

Recently David Szetela, host of PPC Rockstars on Webmaster Radio had an interview on March 8th at Mountain View with Google Adwords Evangelist, Frederick Vallaeys.  It's an excellent show and alot is gone over in just a small amount of time.  It's definitely worth a listen-or two.  The link is below:

http://www2.webmasterradio.fm/ppc-rockstars/2010/adwords-quality-score-myths-and-facts/

SEO for Blog Posts Part 4: The "Key" to More Traffic on Your Website?

Have you ever fumbled around in the dark for just the right key to open the door to your car?  Your visitors are looking for you. Don't lock them out by using the wrong keywords. They have children too!It can make a seemingly normally coordinated person turn into completely clumsy one in a hurry- trying to put the wrong key into the lock and not being able to get it open.  Frustrating isn't it?  

Well that's not how you want visitors to your site to feel.  They've likely typed in a phrase or keywords into Google hoping to get the answer to their question and they will feel frustrated if they end up on a page that doesn't have anything to do with what they're looking for. 

For example, if someone types in "Pet Toys" in a search engine and ends up on a site for "pet tricks" they'll leave pretty quickly.  Why?  It's just not what they were looking for.  That's often what happens when people write content but don't include the proper keywords in their blog posts.  We want our blog posts and any pages we write to draw readers who say "Yes! this is exactly what I'm looking for!"-right?

So how can you make sure that what you are writing about in your blog post ends up being read by people who are looking for it?  In a word:  Keywords.

 In the last few blog posts we've gone over writing for the search engines vs. writing for people who actually read your blog and writing searchable yet catchy title tags but now we'll take a moment to talk about how to use keywords in your blog posts to get maximum traffic. 

How to and Tools:

Keyword Research Step 1

Please read SEO for Blogs Part 3:  Double Sided Title Tags That Stick. After you read and do what it says there you should have some nice keywords in your title tags.  Now you're going to take those keywords and put them into a keyword research tool and see what comes up. There are a ton of keyword tools out there.  If you're going to use just one, please use: Google Adwords Keyword Tool

If you want to check out a bunch then here are more on Aaron Wall's SEO Book page: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools

What you're looking for

These tools will show you not just the popular keywords but keyword modifiers, synonyms and phrasing you may not have thought of. 

Keyword Research Step 2

Unlike a static web page, blogs are more social in nature and often rely on what's new, what's fresh- what people are talking about now.   You need more than just keyword ideas to reflect that.  So how can you find this out?  More tools:

Using your keywords you have researched, do a search on the following sites to see what's going on in the area of what you're writing about:Technorati, Google Blog Search, and Google News. Services like Google Trends and Yahoo! Buzz Index

Now you know what and how people are talking about the ideas and keywords you're targeting.  You can adjust your blog post and the way you use your keywords accordingly.

Putting it all together

Now that you've taken a few minutes to do keyword research how exactly should you use them in writing your blog post?   Let's start with the don'ts:

Don't stuff every keyword known to mankind in your blog posts.   This isn't 1999: the search engines know about this bad technique and could ban you for keyword stuffing.

Don't make you're blog post sound weird or robotic just to get that keyword in there to supposedly rank higher.   Remember, it may be the search engines that crawl your site but it's people who read it.  They just won't hang around, never mind become a regular reader if your posts sound lame and don't have the human touch.  See  the post SEO for blog posts Part 2:  You're Only Human- And That's OK.

Now the Do's:

Use the keywords, synonyms, modifiers and phrases in your posts a few times, but only if it sounds natural like a real person wrote it.  Balance writing well for people with putting these keywords in.

It's really that simple.

Isn't it interesting that you have the key(words) to whether you're blog posts draw people who are searching for your content.  As tempting as it may be to just shoot out a quick blog post, take the five minutes to research your keywords.  The benefits are obvious:  People will find what they're looking for on your blog, and they may become regular loyal readers and continue to return for more.