Techblog
SEO for SMEs: What Google Search looks out for on your webpage
Showing up on search engine results has become one of the best ways for your business to be found online. But what does a search engine such as Google look for? Read on to find out how to increase your chances of getting picked up by Google searches.
By the myBusiness techblog team
You may or may not know that Google doesn’t rank websites according to meta keywords anymore. Meta keywords are a set of words that you put into your webpage's coding (not shown to users viewing the page) that defines what kind of content you have on the page. Instead, Google's generation of page titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page, as well as references to it that appear on the web.
The goal of the snippet and title is to best represent and describe each result and explain how it relates to a user's query. Google utilises several sources to display its results, including descriptive information in the title and meta tags for each page. Here are some tips on how you can improve on your website's meta descriptions and title tags:
1. Create good meta descriptions that summarise the page's content
A webpage's description meta tag provides Google and other search engines with a summary of what your webpage is all about. While a webpage's title can be a phrase or a few words, a webpage's description meta tag needs to be a sentence or two, or a short paragraph. Description meta tags are important because Google can display them as snippets of your webpages on search result pages. We say "can" because Google may choose to use another relevant section of your page's visible text if it matches up closer with a user's query.
Here are some quick tips to properly use the meta description tag:
- Have a meta description for each page, and make them unique to each other
Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your website domain.
- Create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page
Write a description that would both inform and interest users - as if they read your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.
Remember to avoid:
- Writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
- Using too generic a description such as: "This is a web page" or "Page about baseball cards"
- Writing the description meta tag with only keywords
- Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag
To help you even more, Google Webmaster Tools provides a handy content analysis section to let you know if any description meta tags that are either too short, long, or duplicated too many times.
2. Create unique, accurate page titles
Page titles are critical to providing users with a quick insight into the content of a result and why it's relevant to their query. They are often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it's vital to use high-quality titles on your web pages. You can use the following tips to help you manage your titles:
- Indicate page titles by using title tags
A title tag tells both users and search engines what the topic of a particular page is. The
- Page title contents are displayed in search results
If your document appears in a search results page, the contents of the title tag will usually appear in the first line of the results. Words in the title are bolded if they appear in the user's search query. This can help users recognise if the page is likely to be relevant to their search.
- Page titles should be descriptive and concise.
Avoid vague descriptors like "Home" for your home page, or "Profile" for a specific person's profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles, which are likely to get shortened when they show up in the search results
Remember to avoid:
- Keyword stuffing - It's helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the title, but there's no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. A title like "Lolcats lolcats, lolcat, LOL cat" doesn’t help either the user, or Google, as it can make your results look spammy.
- Repeated or boilerplate titles - Distinct, descriptive titles for each page on your website are important. Titling each page on a commerce site with "Cheap products for sale", for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish one page from another.
Your website could be of any size or content, but the optimisation tips we discussed above should apply to websites of all sizes and types. We hope our guide gives you some fresh ideas on how to improve your website, and elevate your business result on a Google search result page.
Try out the changes above, and see if you encounter any difference in your website results. We’d love to hear from you, so please post your questions, feedback, and success stories in the comment box below.