Ever since search engines have been in existence digital marketing companies have been selling search engine optimisation packages telling you must achieve certain criteria in order to be found on page one of google, but are these practices still important and is it really worth paying someone to do it for you?
What is search engine optimisation?
Historically search engine optimisation, or SEO, was all about getting the meta date in place on your site, with the correct structure, let’s start by explaining what meta data is.
Meta Data is a few lines of hidden, or not viable to the browser, that informs the search engines basic details about the content that is contained on each page. These traditionally are as follows:
- Page Title
- Page Description
- Keywords.
In the early days Keywords were one of the most important tools and you could quickly tell the search engine robots (the tool they use to harvest information on your site), these keywords quickly informed the robots what your site was about and allowed them to effectively categorised your content in there directory listings.
The use of keywords did not last long as they were quickly abused by users by including keywords not related to their content to steel traffic from other sites. Its widely regarded now that keywords have little or no use today and are widely ignored by all search engines.
The importance of Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
Today the page title is normally seen as the most important section to help with SEO. A short well written title used to describe the page content is normally what you see in search result listings. Google will sometimes automatically create a title for you if it thinks the one you have set is not correct. Although this may not affect how google prioritises your content in results, its normally the first thing customers and visitors see before clicking the link, so it is vitally important.
The Meta Description should be a shorth paragraph of text that describes the content on the page, but should not repeat any content that is on the page, i.e. do not copy and paste the first paragraph of your main content here.
Meta descriptions historically appear before your page title on search engine listing, but quite often these can be automatically be replaced by search engines with paragraphs of text from your main content that they deem t be more important.
It’s still recommend to include a good clear well written paragraph in the meta description.
Conclusion: Usefulness of Meta Data in modern day SEO
Whilst the inclusion of page tiles and meta descriptions is still very important in SEO its more important to ensure you have good quality unique content. Keywords have no real value in improving search engine performance. To improve your page titles and descriptions is worth checking current standards on how many characters should be included in each one.