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00:11 – Giving each page title & description different names; character limit
1:00 –What happens when overly-stuffing key words into page titles and page descriptions
1:27 – Measuring your website’s compliance with search engines
2:02 – Content marketing strategy for e-commerce websites
2:41 – How to deal with exact match domains
3:40 – Getting your site rank high for good quality content
00:11 – Giving each page title & description different names; character limit
One thing that a lot of website owners don’t understand is that you need to have a different title and description for each of the pages within your website. If you have the same description or the same page title on several pages, you might actually be hit with a Google duplicate content penalty.
You title should be as long as 70 characters – when I say characters that means letters and spaces – that doesn’t mean 70 words. And your description should be no more than between 150-155 characters.
The reason for this is that when search results appear on the page there is only so much room for them. So when you have a long page title or a long description it is not going to fit on the page.
1:00 –What happens when overly-stuffing key words into page titles and page descriptions
The one thing you need to be very careful of is that you don’t overly-stuff key words into your page title and your page descriptions. If you do that then you are likely to be seen as doing keyword stuffing which can also attract a penalty.
Also think about when you are creating your page descriptions that they have a clear call to action or that they are attention-grabbing.
1:27 – Measuring your website’s compliance with search engines
Another thing you might want to think about is to ensure that your website is connected to Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google and it will let you know if your site is compliant with the search engines, particularly Google. If there are crawl issues or page load issues or other type of errors on your site, Google Webmaster Tools will now e-mail you to let you know when there are critical errors.
So if you don’t already have your website connected, please make sure you do. If there are errors on your site, it may very well be affecting the ranking.
2:02 – Content marketing strategy for e-commerce websites
One thing that I have been asked recently is whether or not an e-commerce site should have a good content marketing strategy. Well, a very simple answer to that is ‘Yes, yes, and yes’. Just have a look at Amazon.com and you will very quickly see the amount of content they pump through their website. It’s not just about selling products, but they also have a lot of written content and video content.
So if you do have an e-commerce site and you are not currently putting good quality regular content on it then I recommend that you do because it is more than likely going to help you with the rankings of your website for those very important product names.
2:41 – How to deal with exact match domains
Matt Cutts from Google announced on Twitter the other day that a ‘weather change was on the way’ for low quality exact-match domains.
What do I mean by that?
Well, there was a time when if you bought a domain name and you had the exact key words in it you would have a much stronger chance of ranking very well for that key word.
Now those days appear to be over. What Google is now doing with their algorithm is working out whether the domains that have the exact phrase or the exact key words in them are actually good quality sites. You can’t just get away with having the exact key words in that domain name and expect that you are going to rank.
So if you do own an exact match domain I highly recommend that you check out to make sure that it is a good quality site. And what I mean by that is that not only having a well built website but also a site to which you are adding regular good quality content. If you don’t, then you might find that the ranking for that website is going to drop.
3:40 – Getting your site rank high for good quality content
You heard me speak quite a bit on this news update about creating good quality content and doing that on a regular basis. And this is something that our SEO team at Super Savvy Business does for our clients.
So if you are a busy business owner and you don’t have time to be managing this content but you want to get your website ranking for good quality search terms, then Super Savvy Business have an SEO team ready to help you out with your marketing.
My name is Fiona Soutter and this is the SEO update of the week. We’ll see you next week!