Seo Melbourne, Search Engine Optimisation Services

The Meta Description on your page is not a direct ranking factor. It used to be, back in the day when Google felt as though it could extend some trust to webmasters, but much like the keyword tag it has declined in important over the years - you now derive no SEO benefit from optimising a Meta Description. Does this mean you shouldn’t pay any attention to your Description? No, of course not!

You can find your Meta Description in the head section of an HTML document. It will be incorporated within a Meta tag. To add a Meta Description, just insert some text within this tag. Once the page is indexed in a major search engine, and providing your have optimised the description correctly, you will see it display beneath your result in the SERPs.

Your Description is essentially a sales pitch. You can see your Description in the SERPs underneath one of your listings. This is the first point of contact you will have with a prospective visitor and, much like with your Page Title, it’s important to make a good first impression. There has been a great deal of research on this topic and all the evidence suggests that a listing in position number five in Google with a strong Meta Description will receive a great level of click-through rate than a website in position number four with either no Meta Description or one that is poorly optimised.

So what do you need to do to make a good impression? Include a call to action. A call to action like “get”, “buy” or “find” will entice the user to visit your website. Sell your page and make sure the user reading your listing knows what the page is about and exactly what they can achieve from clicking-through. Make sure the description is no more than 200 characters, including whitespace, long, this will prevent any possibility of text being cut from your description when it is displayed in the SERPs.

The text that is used in the links that point to your website has a major effect on the position of your website in Google’s search results.

For example, if many people use the text “buy blue widgets” to link to your website, then it is very likely that the linked web page will get high rankings for the keyphrase “buy blue widgets” in Google’s search results.

The link text (also called anchor text) is the text that is used in text links. Example:

<a href=”http://www.example.com”>this is the link text</a>

Unfortunately, not all anchor texts will be used by Google

AFTER years of being characterised by many in the newspaper industry as thieves - freeloading aggregators of information, pillagers of content produced by the efforts of others - Google is sending the industry a message: We’re here to help. That was the message delivered last month by Google chief executive Eric Schmidt to a group of newspaper executives in Washington. Alan Noble, head of engineering at Google Australia, delivered the same message in Melbourne last week at a presentation for the Committee for Economic Development of Australia.

There are three parts to Google’s vision of how media and communications will develop in the next decade: the continuing spread of social networking; the rise of the cloud; and the impact of mobile technology. ”The internet is a remarkable force, a platform for innovation, and much of that innovation can be quite disruptive,” says Noble. ”But we believe that innovation and the disruption that comes with it is fundamentally a force for good.”

Noble says that the onus is on media companies to take advantage of the internet to develop new business models and new ways of engaging with audiences. ”Google doesn’t think it has all the answers but we certainly have some ideas about how that can be done.”

Noble says we need to understand that how people consume information is changing. The ”millennial generation” - those born into the digital age who know nothing else - look first to their social networks for news, then to more formal sources.

The good news, says Noble, is that young people are consuming more news than ever. ”Teenagers are reading more news - something like 25 or 30 per cent more - than they were a decade ago,” he says. ”They’re just not reading newspapers.” Time to open a paper is a ”bit of a luxury” for Noble, he says. He gets his news from social networks, RSS feeds, Google Reader and Twitter. ”The social web can make journalism even better because the audience is not going to consume news passively but is going to engage with it, they’ll pass it on saying you really must read this article. It’ll even help media organisations grow their audience.”

”The caveat,” says Noble, ”is that you must be relevant. As long as you retain relevance there are boundless opportunities.” Schmidt’s message to the media can be boiled down to one line: ”We’re all in this together.” But is Google on a PR mission to spread the idea that quality content and the traditional media must survive, because its own fortunes are bound up with them?

”We absolutely recognise the importance of ensuring that quality content - quality newspapers - not only survive but thrive. ”Connecting users with captivating, engaging stories is as vital to our business as it is to a media company.”

source: news.com.au