It Only Takes One Poorly Designed Element

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Search engine optimization is a sum of many processes. Get one even a little wrong and it can undo all your hard work. Take a site that has plenty of well written content, has developed a steady stream of links and engaged article and directory submissions in a well thought out program. There is a good chance they will rank quite highly in the search results.

The problem is, you can rank number one for the best keyword for your niche and still not see a significant rise in your traffic. One cause for this problem is a poorly written title. If your pages are ranking well yet there is no increase in traffic, do a search and check the snippet that appears with the search results. Does it sell your page?

More importantly, how does it compare to the results either side of it. There is a good chance those pages surrounding yours have much better snippets and it is that snippet that is losing you traffic. Search engines will generally use your pages title tag as the snippet but only if it suits the search results. If it doesn’t, the search engine will find a snippet from within the pages text.

There are several ways to convince the search engine to use a snippet of your creation. The first and most obvious is to write an effective title tag for your page. Include the most important keyword once, close to the beginning of the tag if possible.  Your second opportunity comes with the first paragraph of your text. Again, include the keyword as close to the start of that paragraph as possible.

Chances are, the search engine will use either your title tag or a portion of the text from your first paragraph. Either way, if it is well constructed it will help attract searchers thus completing your search engine optimization and good user experience.