Auditing your SEO data with tips from Mequoda Summit West 2012
Metadata has two distinct functions; it helps search engines understand your content, and it helps users engage with it. Without properly designed metadata, search engines and users alike may neglect your content.
At the Mequoda Summit West 2012, we shared a few tips for metadata that will help your SEO efforts and engage your audience easier. Take a look at these tips below.
SEO Metadata Characteristic #1: Title element: This component is critical for SEO because it is the first things search bots look at. Digital publishers need should attempt to insert keywords towards front of the title element for better crawling results. Title elements also need to be unique. Duplicate content within titles will hurt your content in search engines.
SEO Metadata Characteristic #2: Meta description: This component is important for click-throughs, but not necessarily ranking aspects. The Google search bots are not paying attention to metadata but your audience members certain are. Think of creating meta descriptions as a copywriting exercise where you are encouraging visitors to go to your website. Since meta descriptions are typically used by websites, if you aren’t creating them and creating them well, users will probably not visit your web pages.
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SEO Metadata Characteristic #3: Keywords in metadata need to be aligned with the content on-page. Bing is one search engine that requires the keywords to be active and reflective of the article’s content. They pay attention to this content to see if you are spamming.
SEO Metadata Characteristic #4: Titles need to be more than 20 characters and less than 66 characters in length. If too long, Google won’t see the end of your title. This is harder to do with ecommerce because the title is often the name of the product. If this is true for you, try using relevant keywords early in the title with a colon, and then the name of the aligned product.
SEO Metadata Characteristic #5: Include a maximum of 100 links on any given page. This includes internal and external links. Having over 100 links may not necessarily have negative impacts, but SEOmoz sets it as a warning because it’s possible you will experience negative results more excessive linking.
SEO Metadata Characteristic #6: Load time is important for two main reasons. First, if your website is too slow, search engine spiders will not be able to accurately crawl the site. Next, there is site engagement. If your website is not loading quickly, users will bounce off the site to look for the content elsewhere. If you don’t know how long it takes your website to load, try using Pingdom. It has a free option for calculating the load time of your website.
Do you have any other simple metadata changes to suggest to the community? Please add them in the comments below.
Thank you so much for this information in simple changes you can make on metadata. The information was really useful and the tips were very effective. The article was really very well-explained.