Text snippets – those wee precocious dahlings displayed in the SERPS pulled predominantly from the meta description, or the first sentence in the body copy, or from underneath the kitchen table covered in dog-poo (the neighbour’s, of course) – may find themselves accompanied from time to time by a snippet link (think Supernanny, but without the relentless emphasis on the ‘what makes him do it and how to stop it’ thing going on. And on).
There are two variations of Google snippet links. read more
The meta description tag has so little relative ranking power (to the page title) that we might just as well concentrate on click-through, and in regards to click-through it can be – heck, is – a major factor. read more
Snippet links and sitelinks are the same thing. Although, if you want to split hairs, you could argue that a snippet link is a link that occurs within the snippet itself while a sitelink is a link that is presented to the searcher below the destination url. read more
A snippet is a description of, or an excerpt from, the webpage that follows the title and precedes the URL and cached link in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Simply put, the snippet refers to the description portion of a Google search listing; it doesn’t include the title, nor does it include the URL.
Snippets are determined query-time; in other words, they vary depending on the keyword being searched on. read more
We started our ruminations with ranking because a page that does not get ranked does not get clicked – go figure.
• Titles that don’t rank, get no clicks
• Human sensible titles get more clicks
• Most humans read left to right
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Body copy has never been a significant factor at Google in terms of ranking but is absolutely critical to long-tail ranking where no-one is generally even trying to rank, so just having the phrase somewhere on the page is sufficient to get as much traffic as there is.
Each of these long-tail searches is really small in volume but they are more numerous than we will ever actually measure so the total can generally add up to be half of all the traffic to you site. read more
Well-structured titles are a schooling fish, which, I’ve recently discovered, is not the same thing as a shoal of fish.
Shoals are loose herds of fish travelling in the same direction. Schools are co-ordinated and disciplined; they move in unison, keep a set distance, travel at the same speed, and nobody knows why they do it, except a keyword separated from the school shows signs of distress. read more
The first match of keywords on the page appear to get selected far more often than the latter mentions of the same words, even if the latter mention of the phrase might be a better match.
Okay, so who cares?
Well, if you don’t now, you will in a second. read more
The rest of the on-page factors are far less important than the title tag, in terms of ranking, so much so, in fact, that I relegate them to mid-tail or long-tail influencers only. For these far less competitive searches, the search phrase alone is sufficient to garner decent ranking. Coupled with a couple of decent inbound links and top ranks are often trivial. read more
The Title tag is the single most important on-page factor in terms of ranking: without your search phrase in the title it is difficult to get ranked – not impossible, you can overwhelm it with page rank and link reputation, but Title is an important factor – though, you know, not an all or nothing proposition either. The strength of match between the search phrase and the title works on a scale more or less as shown here, from strongest match to weakest match.
- Exact Phrase
- Partial Phrase
- Interrupted Phrase
- Keywords
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