Titles and Descriptions - Useless or Valuable?

[Simon]

Okay, so that's not the whole question.

But it got you here, plus it has Useless in it.

Now on to the actual questions...


PREABMLE:

Since we're pretty new to building free sites, I'm always interested in learning ways we can improve them. One thing I've noticed is that while pretty much all of the free sites that get accepted to link lists do have a title for the site, and most submitters would've entered a description on the submit page, they often seem to be lacking any meta title and meta description tags in the html...which kind of surprised me.

I'm thinking that those are probably the only two remaining meta tags worth using (aside from the GooglePray tag of course LOL), and that using them well can help quite a bit when search engines index your free site pages. (some info here http://www.highrankings.com/issue139.htm#stuff)

Okay, here we go...

QUESTION ONE:

My first question is whether you think the meta title tags and meta description tags are worth spending time on for free sites. I guess the answers here may vary depending on whether someone builds for link lists only, search engines only, or both. We do spend some time on those two tags for our hosted free sites, and I'm trying to decide how much time we should allocate to this part of the process.

QUESTION TWO:

My second question is about the "best" length for the title and the description that are used to submit the site to Link Lists. I've been looking around at some Link Lists' rules to see what's acceptable, and I don't find much about this anywhere. Only Penisbot seemed to have something published in their rules ("2-5 words titles and descriptions up to 70 chars length"). So I'm wondering if you have a good 'average yardstick' of what you consider the perfect length for a title and description you're submitting to a Link List. Or for Link List owners, what lengths do you like to see on submitted site titles and descriptions?

Thanks in advance for any feedback you can offer.

Simon

[Cleo]

I always put meta tags on everything that I build as I figure they can't hurt and only take a few seconds to do.

I try to keep mine short and simple.

[swedguy]

Question 1:
I put it on all sites, but I don't spend that much time on it.

Question 2:
On the places where have title and description listed after each other it adds up to around 100 characters before there's a line break on 800x600. So if a submitted title + description is over 100 chars, I edit them

[Surfn]

Originally Posted by Cleo

I always put meta tags on everything that I build as I figure they can't hurt and only take a few seconds to do.

I try to keep mine short and simple.

That makes two, same here.

[Sarah_Jayne]

I always put them in too. I would rather they not be noticed than the turn out to be needed and I didn't bother.

[Simon]

Cleo | Surfn | Sarah ~ Thanks, that's pretty much what I'm thinking too. I can't see how they'd hurt, and they don't take that much time to do, so why not do them? But since I'm seeing free sites without any meta tags, I was wondering what those builders were thinking. Were they too lazy, or did they not know any better...or do they know something I don't? (Right now I'm leaning toward one of those first two).

Swedguy ~ Thanks for the feedback on both questions. Your answer on question #2 helps me see that it might make sense to keep the title/description combo used for the site submissions under 100 total characters.

I wonder, do many other list owners or reviewers prefer a total of 100 characters or less?

And more on both questions welcome from everyone.

Simon

[Linkster]

First off - the title is required by most LLs in order to get a listing - if you dont have the meta title they will usually get turned down

Second - the description meta is what Google will use if it cant find a text snippet to use for your page in their listings

Third - Yahoo uses all of the metas as part of their ranking algo - they are the major that still uses the keyword meta as well.

Fourth - since it only takes a few seconds and will help immensely with SE listings - it is after all part of the SE's algos - why not? You will notice when searching in Google that the title when combined with on page factors plays a large part in the listing rankings

[Surfn]

Sites with out Metas are usually cheaters or complete noobs.

[Linkster]

I guess I left out the most important part - when you are writing the title and description - remember that in lots of cases that is what the surfer to the LL is going to see - therefore the better it "presells" and sounds like something you'd really want to click on - the better your conversions are going to be - later on this same principle will play in how SE surfers will react to your free sites that eventually get listed in the SEs

[Fido]

Just be careful when using keywords meta tags. They actually CAN hurt your rankings. If you use words that do not exist on the page itself, you can be penalized for irrelevancy.

[MrYum]

Originally Posted by Surfn

That makes two, same here.

Make that a threesome

[Jel]

It's now a gang bang, I always (99%) use 'em.

[Halfdeck]

The only case when a description meta may hurt is if you use identical ones under one domain. Google may list those pages as "similar pages."

As already mentioned, the TITLE/description metas are not only SEO tools...they should be human friendly (i.e. avoid too much capitalization and boring descriptions).

Also, some big sites do some of their branding with their title/description, so even if surfers read past your SE listings, they'll see your site name over and over again (one good example I can think of is Freeones, which comes up alot for babes' names).

I personally don't put too much weight on descriptions. If I think there's sufficient on-page text with decent keyword density for a targetted key phrase, I might decide not to bother with meta tags at all. If I'm in a hurry, sometimes I just cut a part of the page text and insert that into my description.

[Useless]

Since some pervert (Simon ) was subconsciously thinkng about me when he wrote the thread's title, which set off my boardtracker btw, I've decided to answer. I'm a big believer in using every tag and attribute available to you. Some of the most basic things like that can be the most important SEO steps taken by the average builder.

[Simon]

Sorry for the delayed replies, still getting used to being alone in this place, and discovering how many things I usually don't have to do for myself.

Also had to track down some webmasters linking to us with bad links...

NOTE: If anyone here happens to think that your code for our program is 944009, congratulations, you have 6 listings in Yahoo for our hosted free sites with your code stuck on the end. Unfortunately, that's neither the way our links are done, nor is 944009 a code for anyone ever in our program!

Okay, thanks much for the responses, and now to reply to them...

Surfn ~ I didn't want to make the question " Are sites without metas usually cheaters or complete noobs?" 'cause it would've been too confrontational. So thanks for answering my unasked question!

(I'm not doing confrontational stuff until I have at least a 's worth of posts behind me.)

MrYum and Jel ~ Thanks!
It sounds like a nice gangbang, some good people there.

UWarrior ~ Okay, first: "takes one to know one."
Second: Thanks for jumping in with your post... sounds like the gangbang's about complete.

Fido ~ Thanks for bringing up a good point. Yes, we saw that happen with a lot of pages on one of our domains after someone 'optimized' them for us. This was a few years ago, and we had to learn a lot quickly of about how not to do irrelevant keyword stuffing.

From time to time I still run across old pages on some of our ancient feeder sites with comment tags, alt tags, and every possible tag attribute filled with 'relevant' keywords. This is not at all how we do things today. We've seen a lot better results just building content-rich pages focusing on whatever we know folks are looking for.

But keywords weren't supposed to be part of this thread, so we'll return now to the discussion on title and keyword meta tags. And maybe something about the suggested character counts for titles and descriptions submitted to link lists (damn, I guess I really should have made those separate threads)...

Halfdeck ~ Thanks for joining in!
Yes, that "identical descriptions" is a problem we had with a site that got rejected for some dmoz listings. But we're actually seeing Google do the "similar pages" thing now on some of our HFS pages, with the similar pages being ones with other affiliate codes in the url (it has the same description since it really is the same page).

We do use the 'branding' you mentioned, just not on our (hosted) free sites. Our tour page titles begin with FetishClub.com followed by something different for each page.

And yes, if on some page we've clearly described that page's reason for being there in a sentence or two, I'll use those identical sentences in the description tag.

Linkster ~ Glad to see you join in on this one!

Regarding the good points you made:

1. I did see that some LLs required meta title tags. That's part of why I made sure we're using them on all of our free sites.

2. Okay, and that could be pretty important on some free site pages where the text is mostly in graphics with matching text in the alt tags.

3. I definitely want to consider Yahoo, since they've picked up most of our HFS already (most with the webmaster ids in the urls).

4. I agree, it does seems like only a minute or so of work for a worthwhile return. I don't know exactly how the ranking algorithms work, but they sure do seem to like it when the title, description and actual page content match up in certain ways.

Regarding your "most important part" feedback - Thanks, and I couldn't agree more. I think you've seen some of our HFS, we're trying to do a good job providing good titles and descriptions on those. None of that "Blonds Fucked Hear - you now sea fuck her good long hard time."

This touches on the other part of what I was asking about. One question was about using the title and description meta tags, and I think we've nailed down that those definitely are worth using, and in fact are not useless at all.

But my second question was about the title and description that someone submits to a Link List. On our (hosted) free sites we use the same information for meta tags as we provide for LL owners and others to use, and I guess that's fine. But I'm still wondering if anyone (besides Swedguy) has suggestions for the length of the title and the description for a site being submitted to a Link List.

Too short is pretty easy, but what's too long for instance? We've been shooting for no more than five words in the title (3 when possible) and no more than 100 characters in the description. Swedguy's feedback was that 100 characters total between title and description may be better in some cases. Anyone else have guidelines on what's too long?

Simon

[tickler]

Originally Posted by Simon

Halfdeck ~ Thanks for joining in!
Yes, that "identical descriptions" is a problem we had with a site that got rejected for some dmoz listings. But we're actually seeing Google do the "similar pages" thing now on some of our HFS pages, with the similar pages being ones with other affiliate codes in the url (it has the same description since it really is the same page).

Duplicate pages do seem to have certain good points in the rankings though. Seems like a page with 100 "similar pages" ends up ranking a little better than a page with only 50. Just my own observation with similar galleries showing up on SEs.

Originally Posted by Simon

...we're trying to do a good job providing good titles and descriptions on those. None of that "Blonds Fucked Hear - you now sea fuck her good long hard time."
Simon

Typos can be a good thing to throw in sometimes, since most of the surfing population can't seem to spell without a running a spell checker. Just look at all the "typo" domains.