photo credit: davidflanders

Is your blogs title and meta description important for SEO? Hmm, not so much…

I recently listened to Robert Phillips' interview of Fred Black about SEO. If you don't know Fred has been consistently on the front page of Google for the past 8 to 12 months(??) for the competitive term 'internet business'. Robert asked his advice (after using a lot of bad advice) and using it got on the first page for the same term and several of his other sites for other terms several months later.

I'm currently implementing some of the ideas for my own sites now and look forward to reporting the results in the near future.

You can check out the interview on SEO.

One of the things covered was that the meta description is not important in SEO (this has been common knowledge for some time) nor was there any evidence that the title or domain name play any part in first page rankings.

While these elements may not help you get to the first page on Google, my thoughts are that they play a significant role in determining whether someone will click on your link once you are on the first page.

Take the Adwords ads on the left side of the page. The number one way to increase your clickthru rate in Adwords is to stick your keywords in your headline - the equivalent to your site's title in the natural results.

The next thing people look at before clicking through in Adwords is the domain name. It's recommended that you test different domain names to see how it affects your click through rate. Your domain is displayed in the google natural results too - and what's displayed usually plays a part in whether or not I click on the link.

The least significant determiner (though still significant) in Adwords is the blurb in between the headline and the domain name. In the natural results Google will display your meta description if it contains the keywords being searched on, otherwise it takes an excerpt from somewhere on your site with the keywords on it. This is your chance to convince the searcher that they should go to your site! You should make the most of it by crafting the diplayed message and putting it in the meta description.

These things are easy to test in Adwords - they are nearly impossible to test in the natural results. It makes sense to me that before you start doing SEO, you should have determined (via Adwords) what the best headline, description and domain name get you the most clickthroughs - not to mention determine which keywords you should be targeting for SEO in the first place.

If you're already doing SEO and know your keyword targets, it shouldn't be that hard or expensive to run Adwords campaigns on just those targeted keywords to test these 3 elements on your page to increase your natural search engine ranking clickthroughs. Once you start to have decisive winners, you can change these elements on your site for the next time google crawls you. (And yes, I realize the domain is going to be hard to change…)

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