When it comes to optimising content, your title can have a large impact. Google page rankings are still heavily influenced by page titles, so you need to make sure they tick all  the boxes. Site titles need to be well-constructed and unique, incorporating the website or company name, while text that is relevant and natural should support this and correspond to your page content.

Take care with sitelinks and meta descriptions

Keep meta descriptions to a maximum of 160 characters. This includes any spaces and will prevent them being chopped off mid-description. If you have sitelinks, you need to be even more conservative with your character usage as you’ll have less space to play with.

You will find sitelinks listed as supplementary direct links in the result pages of Google beneath the site URL.

Make a good first impression with searchers

Your ranking prowess will not improve directly as a result of good meta descriptions. However, they do create a positive impression with your search users. A unique, excellently crafted meta description will help searchers to understand more about the content within a page. This increases the chances of search users choosing to visit your page, rather than those with less well-written descriptions.

Avoid meta description duplication

On the other hand, less skilled use of meta descriptions can effect rankings negatively. Matt Cutts from the Webspam division at Google urges that it doesn’t pay to use duplicate descriptions on those sites containing a large percentage of seldom searched pages. In fact, it would be more beneficial to leave the description blank in this case. Keyword spamming of popular search terms can happen within meta descriptions, and using widespread duplication could be seen as just that.

Paying attention to the finer details of your content could give you the ranking boost you need.

Steven Morris