Visible Control Over Your Site in Google

Writing by Nick Stamoulis ShareThis

One of the most important elements of web marketing is search engine optimization and a very important aspect of that is your listing in the search engines. It’s important to understand that Google does not use your meta data for ranking purposes. However, your meta data is important for Google in its display of your site within the rankings. Two of the most important meta tags are the Title tag and Description tag. Your Title tag appears in Google SERPSs as a blue clickable link in large font size above your Description, what Google calls the snippet.

Google’s primary concern is delivering quality content to searchers. If you don’t provide good Titles and Descriptions for that purpose then Google will substitute your information for something it deems more useful to searchers. In your meta title tag you should provide the most important keyword for the page you are optimizing, but don’t stuff it with keywords that you want to rank for. That will work against your. Also, don’t make your Title too long or Google will rewrite it. You don’t want it to be more than 60 characters.

In your meta description tag you also want to use your most important keyword for the page and possibly a secondary keyword. Again, don’t stuff it with keywords you hope to get ranked for. Also, don’t make it too long. 160 characters or less is optimal for a meta description tag.

You need to also understand that your Google snippet will be different based on a searcher’s search query. That means Google will not always use your meta description. But if you provide quality content on your web page then no matter what search query a searcher uses the snippet will always come from your page. If your content is not helpful or less than reasonable quality then Google could replace it with its own description of your site. That’s a good reason to make sure every sentence of your web page is of the highest quality.

If you write your web page content and meta data with quality and your visitors in mind then you can maintain control over your Google SERP listings. Don’t be careless with your content.