SEO Checklist 2018 - Ranking in the first page of SERP organically.
•Transferir como PPTX, PDF•
13 gostaram•1,029 visualizações
The book is NOW available for FREE till 23:59 IST TODAY. Offer valid for first 100 clicks/buys. ORDER LINK: http://amzn.to/2rxQfMN AUTHOR LINK: www.avikbal.com/books Best wishes for your online success. Happy Reading. Delightful learning. Successful Practicing. What is SEO? Scope? Options? Importance? Types of SEO – OnPage, OffPage, Black, Grey, White Hat SEO How search works ? OnPage & OffPage SEO Techniques. (4 lessons) Wordpress SEO & Yoast SEO Plugin-Installation & Features (5 lessons) Local SEO, Technical SEO Myths and Realities of SEO Practice (4 lessons) Keyword Research & Analysis 100 proven ways of SEO. (4 lessons) 30 Tricks of SEO to rank in just 3-4 Weeks Google Algorithm Updates
Recomendados
Mais conteúdo relacionado
Mais procurados
Mais procurados (20)
Semelhante a SEO Checklist 2018 - Ranking in the first page of SERP organically.
Semelhante a SEO Checklist 2018 - Ranking in the first page of SERP organically. (20)
Último
Último (20)
SEO Checklist 2018 - Ranking in the first page of SERP organically.
- 3. • Keyword Research and Adwords (PPC, PPM etc) • SEO – On and Off Page. Each module is supported by CASE STUDIES – citing best examples of the strategies adopted by the companies in the past.
- 4. QUALIFICATION CERTIFICATIONS DESIGNER | DEVELOPER | MARKETER Hello! www.facebook.com/groups/askyourdoubt/ www.avikbal.com
- 5. SearchEngineOptimization What is SEO ? Why is it important ? How exactly to do it ? Ranking in the first page of Google search organically using Session by AVIK BAL | www.avikbal.com
- 7. search engine optimization free organic editorial natural standards reputation quality content MOST RELEVANT & MOST HELPFUL keyword or search query
- 10. 95.37% 95 % of People don’t go to the 2nd page of search results! of People use Google as search engine
- 11. Knowledge Graph Snippets / Adwords News Mobile Responsive Instant Images and videos How does Magenta Colour looks like ?
- 12. 200 ++ Ways to Rank ! Enrol and follow for algorithm changes updates. A new video every month for the new updates
- 18. Blogs & Feeds Cloaking & Doorway Pages Content andWriting Crawling and Robots Domains & URLs Content Originality Image Search Local Search Mobile Search Video Search Redirects & Navigation Spamming Submitting & Sitemaps HTMLTagging Meta and Slug Inclusion Titles & Descriptions On-The- Page SEO • On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, Off-The- Page SEO • Off-Page SEO refers to all the things that you can do directly OFF your website to help you rank higher, such as social networking, article submission, forum & blog marketing, etc. Depending on technique: • White Hat SEO • Grey Hat SEO • Violations or Black Hat SEO
- 20. For websites who has the urgency to rank In the SERP within a day or few hours. Eg. Newly launched Movie review or Smartphone Review, News Updates,Viral Content Campaign Such bad boy routes to bypass google algorithm’s ranking evaluation can get your website penalised (blocked/thrashed)
- 22. • There Are MoreThan 200 Ranking Factors. • There Are Also Indirect Ranking Factors • SEO is an Incredibly Complicated ProcessThat is Always Changing Google updates its algorithm • You Have to Do Both On-page and Off-page SEO
- 23. people now hardly has to go to 2nd page keep on tweaking changes and conform give you back exactly what you want. howsearchworks SEARCH From Algorithms to Answers.
- 24. SEARCH From Algorithms to Answers. CRAWLING AND INDEXING – it all starts even before you search for a query in search engine ALGORITHMS get to work looking for clues to better understand what the search query means. RANK the results, the most relevant, the most qualitative result. FIGHTING SPAM – Google come up with over 500 algorithm changes every year!Almost 2 changes everyday!
- 25. • A web search engine • PageRank is an algorithm
- 28. Off-Page SEO Techniques Social Networking Sites Search Engine Submission Directory Submission Social Bookmarking Link Baiting Photo Sharing Video Marketing Video Sharing Blog Marketing Social Shopping Network Business Reviews Local Listings Article Submission Answer Questions/Comments Quora,Yahoo Answers Webinars / Colaborations Blogging Blog Marketing
- 29. On-Page SEO Techniques Blog PostTitle HeadingTags Post Permalink Structure Keyword Density MetaTags Images Word Count Per Post Internal Linking External Linking Onsite SEO refers to the optimization of the entire website with things like sitemapping and setting permalink structures. On-page SEO optimizes content for a target keyword within a single blog post.This includes using proper headings, proper keyword placement, ensuring content quality, and paying attention to many other factors.
- 34. SEO & Google Algorithm Updates https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change
- 36. Even if you do submit your site to Google, a submission does not guarantee anything. Crawlers will find your site and index it in due time, so don’t worry about this idea of needing to “tell” Google about your site. Link for GoogleWebmaster & Search Console: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ Google bots (crawlers) will find and index your sites automatically.
- 37. Where shall you invest ? Backlinks or Content ? SEO no more depends on number of backlinks. It’s the quality of the backlink. 5 backlinks coming from very high domain authority reputed sites are more powerful (helpful) than 50 low quality sites of unknown rapport. EXACT MATCH: Keyword: men shoes India Anchor: men shoes India PARTIAL MATCH: Keyword: men shoes India Anchor: buy shoes in india or buy shoes for men Also depends on the Anchor text (keyword hyperlinked) used to create the backlink Watch the lesson on “How Anchor text impacts SEO?” in this course.
- 38. http:// https:// In September 2016, Google announced that Chrome will flag HTTP pages as potentially unsafe starting in January 2017. If your website is currently http:// get a SSL certificate. Make sure you buy SSL certified domain names. If your website still relies on standard HTTP, your rankings could suffer adversely. Does having a secure (and encrypted) web Url really impacts SEO ? Read Further: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
- 39. Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page's content; the meta tags don't appear on the page itself, but only in the page's code Meta Description Keyword Match in Meta Description
- 42. Hummingbird is the overall search algorithm. Hummingbird contains algorithms, such as Panda, Penguin and Payday designed to fight spam, Pigeon designed to improve local results,Top Heavy designed to demote ad-heavy pages, Mobile Friendly designed to reward mobile-friendly pages and Pirate designed to fight copyright infringement.
- 49. Local Listing can impact your web traffic and reach significantly. Get in Google maps. Get Great Reviews. ManageOnline Reputation. List your Location, Contact number, Business Images and description accurately. www.google.co.in/business/ Comparative Listing from Google Business
- 51. Google Image Search is also one of your traffic source! Google displaces popular images in SERP!
- 52. Choose a responsive theme while designing your website. Responsiveness indicates adjustment of the webpage according to the size of user’s device screen in exact ratios. Check your website for mobile friendliness here https://www.google.com /webmasters/tools/mobil e-friendly/
- 53. SEO forWordPress Websites: Course Layout Check your site’s visibility settings Using SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress WWW vs non-WWW in URLs Choosing the BestWordPress SEO plugin Add XML sitemaps inWordPress Add your site to Google Search Console Optimizing your blog posts for SEO 3. WordPress SEO Best Practices Properly using categories and tags inWordPress Make internal linking a habit OptimizeWordPress comments NoFollow external links inWordPress Full posts vs summaries (excerpts) 4. Speed & Security for WordPress SEO Optimize your site’s speed and performance Optimizing images inWordPress for SEO Security and safety of your WordPress site Start using SSL/HTTPS
- 54. Yoast SEO Plugin forWordpress https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/ https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo/ Why ? How to install ? Best Practices ? Other Options (plugins) for Wordpress SEO ?
- 55. Yoast SEO features: Focus keyword & content analysis Post titles and meta descriptions Robots meta configuration Readability check Canonical Breadcrumbs Primary category Permalink cleanup XML sitemaps RSS enhancements Yoast SEO Premium features: HaveTeamYoast install and configureYoast SEO premium for you! » Buy now » InfoA redirect manager Multiple focus keywords Internal linking Insights Social previews Premium support Add-on plugins:
- 56. Snippet Preview
- 57. Content Analysis
- 58. Overall Site SEO Status
- 59. Auto Notification of Bugs. Don’t worry if you go wrong!
- 62. Breadcrumbs Headings Clean up your code Aim for speed Rethink that sidebar HTML sitemaps
- 63. Home > Articles > News > India They allow your users to easily navigate your site. They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily. Enable Breadcrumbs to indicate the right navigation direction from category to subcategory.
- 64. XML HTML To add a sitemap to your WordPress site, first thing you need to do is install and activate WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. By default, WordPress SEO does not enable XML sitemap functionality, so you will have to turn it on. To do that go to SEO » XML Sitemaps and check the box to enable XML sitemap functionality.
- 65. http://validator.w3.org/ • The most important heading on the page should be the H1. • There is usually only one H1 on any page. • Sub-headings should be H2’s, sub-sub-headings should be H3’s, etc. • Each heading should contain valuable keywords, if not, it’s a wasted heading. • In longer pieces of content, a heading is what helps a reader skip to the parts that they find interesting. • Example: H1: Blog’s name H2:Your blog’s tagline, if it’s “keyword-rich”; if not, all your recent posts should have an H2. H3:Your recent posts, or, if those have an H2, this could be used for somewhat older posts. H4: related content in the sidebar, like the heading of an “about” widget. H5: Unrelated headings in your sidebar, footer, etc.
- 66. W3Total Cache WP-Super-Cache unnecessary plugins
- 68. Basic Structuring & Configuration
- 70. In 2014, Google announced that they’d give a (admittedly minor) ranking benefit to HTTPS / SSL sites, and because of that, more and more sites have switched over to SSL. So if you are not having a https URL, buy a SSL certificate. Check link below for SLL buying tips and tricks
- 72. Google Search Console (previously Google WebmasterTools) is a no- charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. As of May 20, 2015, Google rebranded GoogleWebmaster Tools as Google Search Console.
- 74. This feature is used to automatically add content to your RSS, more specifically, it's meant to add links back to your blog and your blog posts, so dumb scrapers will automatically add these links too, helping search engines identify you as the original source of the content. RSS (Rich Site Summary; originally RDF Site Summary; often called Really Simple Syndication) uses a family of standard web feed formatsto publish frequently updated information: blog entries, news headlines, audio, video.
- 75. GIFs, Flash Animations, Static Images andVideo Inserts are all seen as a content interactivenesss enhancers. Helps in improving CTR and engagement. But may slow down your site loading due to heavy file size. Web Crawlers don’t read formats other than HTML texts. So putting alt text attribute is must.
- 77. • Flesch–Kincaid readability tests • Readability higher scores indicate that it is easier to read
- 79. Snippet Preview
- 84. https://moz.com/tools | https://www.semrush.com/ | http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner
- 86. Checklist of 100 To-Dos’ for SEO
- 87. SEO Keyword Checklist Continued in Next Slide. The 100 Must Do SEO Check List
- 88. SEO MetaTag Checklist Continued in Next Slide. The 100 Must Do SEO Check List The <meta> tag provides metadata about the HTML document. Metadata will not be displayed on the page, but will be machine parsable. Meta elements are typically used to specify page description, keywords, author of the document, last modified, and other metadata.
- 89. Link Building for SEO : Checklist Continued in Next Slide. The 100 Must Do SEO Check List Internal, inbound, outbound
- 90. SEO for Content Checklist Continued in Next Slide. The 100 Must Do SEO Check List
- 91. Spamdexing impact on SEO Content spam Link spam Continued in Next Slide. The 100 Must Do SEO Check List Using world-writable pages 1. Spam in blogs 2. Comment spam 3. Wiki spam 4. Referrer log spamming 5. Countermeasures 1. MirrorWebsites 2. Cloaking 3. URL Redirection
- 92. SEO for Multimedia Checklist Continued in Next Slide. The 100 Must Do SEO Check List
- 93. Technical SEO Checklist Continued in Next Slide. The 100 Must Do SEO Check List
- 98. www.avikbal.com
Notas do Editor
- Knowledge Graph Provides results based on a database of real world people, places, things, and the connections between them. Snippets Shows small previews of information, such as a page's title and short descriptive text, for each search result. News Includes results from online newspapers and blogs from around the world. Mobile Includes improvements designed specifically for mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones.
- search seggestions
- indexing
- Result display you don’t even have to visit the website
- SEO Factors Work In Combination No single SEO factor will guarantee search engine rankings. Having a great HTML title won’t help if a page has low quality content. Having many links won’t help if they are all low in quality. Having several positive factors can increase the odds of success while the presence of negative factors can worsen those odds. On-The-Page Success Factors On-The-Page search ranking factors are those that are almost entirely within the publisher’s own control. What type of content do you publish? Are you providing important HTML clues that help search engines (and users) determine relevancy? How does your site architecture help or hinder search engines? Off-The-Page Success Factors Off-The-Page ranking factors are those that publishers do not directly control. Search engines use these because they learned early on that relying on publisher-controlled signals alone didn’t always yield the best results. For instance, some publishers may try to make themselves seem more relevant than they are in reality. With billions of web pages to sort through, looking only at ‘On-The-Page’ clues isn’t enough. More signals are needed to return the best pages for any particular search. SEO Violations & Ranking Penalties Make no mistake; search engines want people to perform SEO because it can help improve their search results. Search engines provide help in the form of guidelines, blog posts and videos to encourage specific SEO techniques. However, there are some techniques that search engines deem “spam” or “black hat”, which could result in your pages receiving a ranking penalty or, worse, being banned from the search engines entirely. Violations are generally tactics meant to deceive or manipulate a search engine’s understanding of a site’s true relevancy and authority.
- White Hat SEO White Hat SEO is the ethical SEO. It is best and the honest way of optimizing your site by following all the guidelines of search engines. These are targeted to improve the position in search results keeping the user prospect in mind, that is the site should be valuable to the user following all the guidelines. It is a time consuming process but long term results are good and permanent. Examples of White Hat SEO Technique: Guest Blogging Link baiting - Linkbaiting is the practice of crafting content that is designed to get other content producers to link to it. The purpose is increasing the number of inbound links to your content and thus improving its performance in search engine results. Valuable Content Internal Linking Title tags and meta tags optimization Meta tags are used to summarize information of a page for search engine crawlers. This information is not directly visibles to humans visiting your website. On page keyword optimization – focussed keyword placement n density Adding fresh content regularly Sitemap creation Pros It is a long term strategy. It provides the best user experience. No risk is involved as all the guidelines are followed. Cons It is a time consuming process. White Hat SEO Services are the costliest of all techniques.
- ) Black Hat SEO It is the wrong way of getting famous by doing something against the rules. In other words Black hat refers to the illegitimate way of optimizing your site going against the guidelines of search engines. It is intended to trick search engines to rank particular pages higher in search results without considering the actual value of the page. Its only aim to rank higher no matter what it take to do so. Examples of Black Hat SEO Technique: Link Farm Hidden Text Keyword Stuffing Paid Links Doorway Pages Doorway pages are defined as low-quality pages (or groups of pages, or entire websites) optimized to rank well for specific keywords that act as a door between users and content. Characteristically, they offer little value to visitors and serve the sole purpose of boosting SEO value. Cloaking Cloaking is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different from that presented to the user's browser. This is done by delivering content based on the IP addresses or the User-Agent HTTP header of the user requesting the page. Parasite hosting Parasite hosting is a search engine optimization (SEO) technique that involves posting a free blog, wiki or forum on a highly respected domain with a high page rank. These free posts are used to create backlinks to a given site, which may boost that site's search engine page rank, thanks to the host's high rank. Manipulative redirects Pros It works for all major search engines (till search engines do not find out) It gives fast results compared to other techniques. Black Hat services are much cheaper than other techniques. Cons It is a short term strategy (will work until you are not caught by search bots) If you are found by search engine your site might be banned. Bad User experience. High Risk level
- Grey Hat SEO As the grey color falls between white and black, this technique also lies into the questionable category of search engine optimization. I called it “questionable” because neither it involves the high risk of site banning as Black Hat nor does it gets into complete valid search engine guidelines. It is a shady approach to optimization which does not break any rules but bend them to say the least. This would not give you a serious risk like a Site ban but might curse you with a penalty. Any technique which is considered Grey might become black in future. Examples of Grey Hat SEO Technique: Three way/ Reciprocal link exchange Buying links for Page Rank Duplicate Content Irrelevant links High keyword density that sounds unnatural but of level of Black Hat. Article Spinning Purchasing Old domains Pros Timeframe involved is not very high. Good user experience. Cons It is also not a permanent strategy. Medium level of risk is always involved.
- http://seopressor.com/blog/indirect-google-ranking-factors/ http://seopressor.com/blog/2016-google-algorithm-changes-14-predictions-from-google-patent/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5RZOU6vK4Q https://www.google.co.in/insidesearch/howsearchworks/thestory/
- Lesson 3: How search works? In this lesson we will have a look on how search engines work. How a simple search keyword fetches you 100s of relevant results in a fraction of a second. In this particular course we are learning how to rank a website in the first page of search results organically. Suppose you are selling shoes online. When I search for buy shoes for men keyword in Google search box, how does google ensure which websites to show me ? There are 1000s of sites selling shoes. There comes the role of SEO. Search engines try to show the most relevant and helpful result to its search queries. So to do SEO efficiently you need to abide by and conform to all the factors a search engine looks in an website before ranking and displaying it against search queries. And to do so you need to understand how exactly these search works. How google is capable of displaying you the most helpful answers to your search queries. The whole process of search and display of answers in a search engines works in 4 major stages. Crawling is where it all begins – Crawling is basically the acquisition of data about a website. This involves scanning the site and getting a complete list of your web content – the page title, the images, your focussed keywords, outbound and inbound links from your website and so on.. Whenever you search for something on internet(web), search engines (eg:Google) send out bots which are kind of algo--rithmic software to browse through its huge index to search for the most relevant result as per your query. This process is called Crawling. Google use software known as “web crawlers” to discover publicly available webpages. The most well-known crawler is called “Googlebot.” Now These crawlers als0 create a copy of the websites that are most relevant to specific keywords (entered by the user). It creates an index of all the web pages relevant to specific keywords to reduce the amount of time if the same query is entered again by some other user. This process of indexing sites on basis of keywords is called Indexing. Google essentially gathers the pages during the crawl process and then creates an index. Much like the index in the back of a book, the Google index includes information about words and their locations. Now coming to algorithm, For a typical query, there are thousands, of webpages with helpful information. Algorithms are the computer processes and formulas that take your questions and turn them into answers. Today Google’s algorithms rely on more than 200 unique signals or “clues” that make it possible to guess what you might really be looking for. These signals include things like the terms on websites, the freshness of content, your geographic location and PageRank, the reputation of the website, social signalling ie how past webvisitors to this website info reacted. Now in this fight of 1000s of websites to rank in the first page, some take up the bad boy route where they try to attempt unauthorised illegal or fake measures to rank up. Hese are called spam sites. Spam sites attempt to game their way to the top of search results through techniques like repeating keywords over and over, buying third party links that pass PageRank or putting invisible text on the screen. It might have happened to you several times that you search for a certain query, click on the displayed result and got nothing relevant on the webpage. That was a trick of the site to drive traffic. This is bad for search because relevant websites get buried and become harder to find. The good news is that Google’s algorithms can detect the vast majority of spam and demote it automatically. Google also have a separate team who manually review sites which cannot be chaecked for spam automatically. Google keeps on changing this search algorithm almost 500 times a year so that you cannot cheat the page ranking formula. Otherwise a website ranking in the first for a certain keyword would have ranked for ever there even if its content got expired or irrelevant with time. So to keep a check on these search and ranking factors you need to stay updated about the algorithm changes. In this course I will be updating a monthly video on recent algorithm updates. Make sure you follow me and stay enrolled In the course so that you get notified when it ones. Further I will request you to visit the resources and further study materials I have shared in the facebook group. The link is shared in the commet box below.There are few videos from google and links to google’s personal blogs where they update about these changes. Visit the group and get those. Slide. So let me sumup the session. The whole search process. Process Google navigates the web by crawling. It follows links from page to page. Sort the pages by their content relevancy against certain keywords. Keep a track of all those website info saving them in index which is basically a database of google. Process: User types a query to search. So as you put in a search keyword Algorithms get to work looking for clues to better understand what you mean. Based on these clues it pulls relevant documents from the index. Rank the results based on various factors (like: safe search, site quality, user context etc.) And voila you have the search result.
- http://onlineincometeacher.com/traffic/off-page-seo-techniques/ read the description n speak
- https://www.shoutmeloud.com/on-page-seo.html
- https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
- Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages.Meta descriptions are commonly used on search engine result pages (SERPs) to display preview snippets for a given page. Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page's content; the meta tags don't appear on the page itself, but only in the page's code. We all know tags from blog culture, and meta tags are more or less the same thing, little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.
- https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easily-access-content-on.html
- http://searchengineland.com/faq-all-about-the-new-google-rankbrain-algorithm-234440
- https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1
- You can check individual pages
- Why wordpress we have discussed in our web dev lesson. From seo pov Amoung popular cms like drupal, joomla.blogspot Or online web builders like weebly, wix etc Wordpress is far far efficien when it comesto SEO friendliness. Wordpress themes are designed with proper web architecture norms so that searchengines cann crawl and index your web pages. So using wpcan reduce a lot of your work in SEO. You just need to install a plugin to control your seo activities. Now over the years the have used more than 10 SEO plugins and tested them on the basis of effectiveness, customization options, how frequently updated, user friendliess, cost of the plugin etc. Yoast SEO has been one of the best plugins in these fronts. If you check, it has the maximum downloads in the wordpress plugins directly and havng a high user rating. It is recommended by wordpress and is the most compatible pluginwith wp cms. In this lesson we will iinstall yoeast seo in wordpress and show you how to implement Seo to your blog content using Yeoast step by step. In the process you will learn a lot about seo strategy and web architecture compatibility with your search engine req
- Now we will discus on the various features and how to use them accourding to the type of coent your have wheather it’s a plain text or a mix of images, videos, do you have inbound or outbound links in your content depending on that your SEO strategy will customised. So first lest start with the installation. Yoast SEO features: Focus keyword and content analysis Post titles and meta descriptions Robots meta configuration Readability check Canonical Breadcrumbs Primary category Permalink cleanup XML sitemaps RSS enhancements Yoast SEO Premium features: Have Team Yoast install and configure Yoast SEO premium for you! » Buy now » InfoA redirect manager Multiple focus keywords Internal linking Insights Social previews Premium support
- Sitemaps are a useful tool for making sites built in Flash and other non-html languages searchable. If a website's navigation is built with Flash, an automated search program would probably only find the initial homepage; subsequent pages are unlikely to be found without an XML sitemap.\\ On 1st Dec 2016 both Bing[5] and Google confirmed that they now support xml sitemaps up to 50MB in size while uncompressed. XML Sitemaps have replaced the older method of "submitting to search engines" by filling out a form on the search engine's submission page. Now web developers submit a Sitemap directly, or wait for search engines to find it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_map#XML_Sitemaps
- https://yoast.com/blog-headings-structure/
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/
- WWW vs non-WWW
- Google Search Console (previously Google Webmaster Tools) is a no-charge web service by Google for webmasters. It allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize visibility of their websites. As of May 20, 2015, Google rebranded Google Webmaster Tools as Google Search Console.
- 2 things comes to picture. SEO n Site speed. http://makeagif.com/categories
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability
- http://adwords.google.com/keywordplanner https://trends.google.com/trends/ https://www.semrush.com/
- Characteristics of a good meta description I think every article on meta descriptions will tell you some of these, but I combined all that made sense to me and came up with this list. Adding the date to the snippet preview We often get questions about this. The option ‘Show date in snippet preview?’ at Titles and Metas in our Yoast SEO plugin doesn’t add the date to the description in Google. It just adds it in the snippet preview in our plugin itself. It will help you decide on the right length of your meta description. Check that option if you find Google adding the publish date to your articles. It should be around 135 to 160 characters. There is no ‘this number is right’ in this. It depends on what Google adds to your search result and how much they want to show. Google might, for instance, add the date to an article, and that will reduce the number of characters. We wrote about going back to 10 blue links. Bearing that in mind, the rule of thumb is that 135 characters is usually fine. Lately, we have even seen meta descriptions that contain over 250 characters. It should be actionable, in an active voice. Of course it should. If you consider the meta description the invitation to the page, you can’t just make it “A mixed metaphor describing a non-existent, yet implicitly high level of qualification.” That’s a dull description. I’ll explain using some examples later. It should include a call-to-action. “Hello, we have such and such new product, and you want it. Find out more!” This overlaps the active voice, but I wanted to emphasize it. It’s your sales text, where your product is the page that is linked, not the product on that page. Invitations like Learn more, Get it now, Try for free come to mind. It could contain structured content. If you have a product for f.i. the tech-savvy, focussing on technical specs of the product could be a good idea. Manufacturer, SKU, price, things like that. If the visitor is specifically looking for that product, chances are you don’t have to convince him. Things like a price will trigger the click. Note that you could, of course, use rich snippets for this as well. It should match the content. This is important. Google will find the meta descriptions that trick the visitor into clicking. It might even penalize the site that created the meta description. Next to that, it will probably increase bounce rate and is a bad idea just for that. You want the meta description to match the content on the page. It should contain the focus keyword. If the search keyword matches text in the meta description, Google will be more inclined to use that meta description and highlight it in the search results. That will make the link more related already. The meta description should be unique. If your meta description is a duplicate, the user experience in Google will be less. Although page titles might vary, all pages seem the same as all descriptions are equal. If you intentionally want / need / are enticed to create a duplicate meta description, you’d better leave the description empty and have Google pick a snippet from the page containing the keyword used in a search. Visit Google Webmaster Tools > HTML Improvements or use Screaming Frog SEO Spider to check for duplicate meta descriptions.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
- https://search.googleblog.com/2015/11/the-google-app-now-understands-you.html