Controlling How Google Describes Your Site
Hello, my name is Leroy and I’m head of development here at Silo88. I’m really excited to be the first to make a post on our totally awesome site! This is the first of many blog posts you will find here about SEO, Marketing, Social Media, and Web Design. Please feel free to ask any questions, make any comments, or aide in the discussions we are having.
So with the introduction out of the way, here is some information on how Google uses your page’s information to display you site’s entry in a Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page). You have access to control exactly what information a user sees about your site, and making sure this information is accurate can some times be the difference in getting that oh so valuable click.
For this example we are going to use a new client of ours, RanchviewFloral.com. This is information from their existing site, so be sure to check back to see their new site as we work with them to develop it.
Title: “Florist Kansas City | Ranchview Floral”
The title for your site displayed by Google is controlled by the “title tag”, which is controlled by a piece of HTML that is part of the code used to display your page to your users. To change this information update the tag which looks like this when viewing the HTML code.
<title>Florist Kansas City | Ranchview Floral</title>
To read a bit more on the title tag of your site take a look here
http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/tag_title.asp
URL: “
www.ranchviewfloral.com”
This is the address to the page returned by Google. In this case, the result returned is the main page of the site. However this could also be a specific page for example “
www.ranchviewfloral.com/flowers.html“. You can control this aspect of the search result by naming the pages on your site with descriptive words related to the content of those pages.
Description: “Local Kansas City Florist. Order flowers online …”
This information is contained in the meta description of your site. This is very similar to the title tag, where the information contained in this tag will be what is displayed in Google’s Description of your site. This tag is located in the HTML code, specifically contained in the <head> tag of your site’s HTML. This description should not be longer than 155 characters long.
<meta name=”Local Kansas City Florist. Order flowers online …” />
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_meta.asp
Tricks of the Trade. Another tag related to the meta description tag which you might have heard of is the meta keyword tag. This tag has been depreciated and is therefore no longer used as part of Google’s Search algorithm. You don’t want to use this tag since it allows your competition to quickly and easily see which key words your site is optimised for.
The directions link, the address, the reviews and the pictures are all related to this site being registered with Google Places. This a very important part of local search optimisation, and should be taken very seriously. Take care to get quality pictures, updated information like phone number & address, and watch the reviews that come in related to your business. Another note about this section is that Google is taking literal user reviews above the 3rd party reviews from their Google Places section. So reviews from “insider pages” and “judy’s list” will not be at the top of list for reviews any more. Currently this is one of Google’s main focuses and you will be seeing more changes and updates coming to this section in the future.
http://www.google.com/places/
Google’s +1 Button
This is a brand new addition to Google’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This “plus one” button is tied to your “Google Plus Profile” and allows users to push the button to signify they like or approve of the site. This is very similar to the Facebook’s like button, however this “+1″ button has much stronger implications to your site’s ranking as it related to Google’s search results.
That’s all for now, but always check back with us to see what new and exciting changes are going on with the web.
