So You’re Page 1 of Google – Now What?
Getting to page 1 of any of the the top search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask… etc) means NOTHING if you’re not optimizing your title tags and description to MAKE people click your link.
You’re probably wondering… “What in the hell is this crazy New Orleanian (WHO DAT!) talking about?”
Getting to #1 on page 1 of Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING if people aren’t clicking on your link to visit your site.
Here I’ll try to ‘splain myself… and right now I’m to lazy to do screenshots so I’ll try my best to help you understand by doing it the “old fashion way”…
When you type your search terms (AKA “keywords” or “keyword phrase”) into a search engine, the page that returns is called a Search Engine Results Page (AKA “SERP” or “SEPRs”). Now that you have a ton of options to choose from its time to read some titles and descriptions to find what I’m searching for.
So lets say that I’m doing a Google search for ummm… lets choose something completely random… lets say I’m looking for “laptop batteries”. So when I type “laptop batteries” into the Google search… I get something that looks like this:
Laptop Batteries Wholesale, Professional Laptop Battery Wholesale Site
Specail in Laptop Batteries,Laptop Battery wholesale at www.laptopbatterywholesale.com
www.laptopbatterywholesale.com/ – Cached – Similar
Well that’s the #1 result… there are plenty more, but this is good enough for what I’m going to talk about.
When people do searches, and they come to a SERP… this (above) is what will make them either click the link, or click someone else’s. Lets take a closer look at the #1 result of a Google search for “laptop batteries”
Line #1: (very important) Laptop Batteries Wholesale, Professional Laptop Battery Wholesale Site
Line #2: (EXTREMELY IMPORTANT) Specail in Laptop Batteries,Laptop Battery wholesale at www.laptopbatterywholesale.com
Line #3: (doesn’t matter… only the url to your site, so I won’t discuss) www.laptopbatterywholesale.com/ – Cached – Similar
Line #1 above is the content that you would enter between your TITLE tags. Titles are used as a mini-headline… you want to grab their attention with the title. You have roughly 70 characters (INCLUDING SPACES) to give a short one-liner about your website. You want to ENTER YOUR MAIN KEYWORD IN YOUR TITLE TAG AT LEAST ONCE… some folks try to sqeeze the keyword in there twice, but once is enough. Also be sure to find a clever way to use your keyword in the title while grabbing their attention, but try using the keyword “naturally” in the title. And again… you only have about 70 characters (INCLUDING SPACES) in the title.
Line #2 is where you really want to take hold of the reader’s attention and MAKE THEM click your link. You have roughly 160 characters to use for the description, and after the 160th character you’ll see an ellipse (…) at the end, which means there’s more to it. This isn’t “bad” per se, but you’d rather try to get your information in there without the need for the ellipse. You Twitter users should be used to getting your message across with limited characters, but please don’t use acronyms and shortcuts here!
You only have about 3 seconds to capture a reader’s attention or else they’ll move on to the next link in the SERPs. you also want to use your keyword in the description, but again… make sure it flows with the message you’re trying to convey. The “description” is entered into a META tag that’s found in your HEAD tag, and it looks like this:
NAME=”description” CONTENT=”Enter your decription here”
Now take a look at the description in the above example… I’m willing to bet that altough this site is #1 overall for a VERY competitive search term… I’ll bet that they don’t get as many clicks as say… the #2 ranked site, whose description reads:
“We sell and recycle batteries for everything. Battery Experts serving personal and business needs. Visit your local Batteries Plus store or request info to …”
This… people… along with the TITLE, are the elements that will get you more clicks regardless of WHERE you’re ranked in the SERPs.
If you’re ranked #1 overall for your keyword, and your TITLE and DESCRIPTION both suck, then you should consider looking at some more “catchy” phrases to use to drive more clicks to your site. That’s the difference between a normal “web designer”, and an “internet marketer”… small things like this are overlooked by your normal web designer… while marketers look at every aspect to drive more traffic… to make more money!
For more… visit Web Business Marketing today!
