Greetings again from London.
In this post I am going to cover the fairly simple process I go through when optimising my titles and meta descriptions for important pages with one dominant term. This process allows me to preview what the SERPS should look like once the page has been indexed and tweak the overall result without having to wait for Google to update.
There is probably a much easier way of doing this – This would be a pretty simply tool for someone to make, but if there is such a tool on the interweb I am yet to find it.
OK, so here’s what I do …
1. Search for the term I am optimising for
I want to make my pages on Blue Widgets look tidier than all the others. Here’s what it looks like now (for the purposes of this post my site is Webmasterworld):
2. Save the SERP I am optimising for
You know the score: File -> Save Page As
Select : Save as type = All Files
3. Open the html file in your favourite text editor
A Google results page will take up just a few long lines of HTML, so the best way to find the code to edit for your pages is to use the search function (search for part of the title).
4. Tweak your title and description
I like to make my pages to look as clear as they can in the SERPs. This can work well if you are not top but the 2 or 3 sites above you have an untidy title and description (snippet).
To do this you have to get both your title and meta description the correct length (to avoid getting “…” at the end), and if possible finish a sentence in the meta description at the correct point to have 2 separate lines (i.e., make the snippet break at the end of a sentence, not mid sentence).
A rough guide for the lengths involved is:
Title: 70 chars
Meta Description: 155 chars
Full stop in meta description: around 90 chars
Getting the break in the snippet at the correct point normally takes a few attempts, but I really like the result of having a creative that reads as 3 separate lines. Google occasionally change this point as well, so it can take some tweaking from time to time.
Something else you must do when editing the HTML of the SERP is to bold the search keywords in the title and snippet. This can make the first line of the snippet longer and change where the line breaks.
Here’s my optimised page for blue widgets. Ignore the actual text used. Optimising that wasn’t the point of this post.
It goes without saying that as well as looking nice and tidy, your creative needs to put out the right message and also be optimised for ranking well. (Noted that I’ve not used the word “blue” in the title of my second page – I know this page can rank without it from previous experience!)
