How to have a Clean Result on Google

04Apr07

I was recently given the opportunity to speak with Adam Lasnik, Google’s Search Evangelist about search engine optimization, and it started me thinking about title tags and meta description tags; specifically, just how important is it to get the words right?

When you search on Google, the two most obvious things that come back are the title of a Web page, and a brief description of it. Most people will easily recognize a result from a search query.

Title:

“Google”

Description:

“Enables users to search the Web, Usenet, and Images. Features include PageRank, caching and translation of results and an option to find similar pages.”

What most people don’t realize is that they can write the words themselves, and they should because if they don’t, Google has to get them from somewhere. One of the sources Google uses to get this information, if you don’t supply it, is the open directory project, but you must be listed there first. Another source is the text on the pages of your Web site; this is important, not pictures, not video, not flash; text.

Write whatever you want, but make sure you use a different title and a different description for each page, because pages are, or should be, different from each other.

If you want your information to come back clean in Google’s search results, keep the characters of your title to less than 65, and keep the characters of your description to less than 165 (when I talk of characters I am including spaces). Most important, make the words count.

Clean: