A Search Engine Listing is a page of your website, which has been listed and indexed by a Search Engine, within a search engine results page and displayed to a user under contextually relevant keywords and search terms. The listing contains a character limited Title and description. Basically each and every page of your website should be listed and indexed within each of the major Search Engines and should be available to potential customers using keyword searches to find your products or services. Each listing should contain a valuable sales message and both the title and description should contain relevant, contextually valuable keywords and search terms.

1)      Identifying Keywords and Search Terms

We need to start by firstly identifying which keywords and search terms are being used by your customers to find your business, products and services. The keyword and search term should be unique and should be associated to each page of your site. Keywords should only be associated to pages which are contextually relevant to the search term. (We will explain about website content later on in the guide). This is normally a process which is undertaken by the detailed analysis of your company’s online potential marketplace and an analysis of your company’s online competition. Under normal circumstances this process would require the skills of a professional SEO but there are some free tools provided by Google which will help you to create an initial Keyword list.

The Google Keyword tool provides relevant keyword variations based on advertiser popularity. The data is not based on Organic Search Traffic but it does give you an indication into the popularity of a keyword.

https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

Another nice tool is Google Insights, which allows you to analyse search engine data based on historic performance.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

2)      Good Content is KING!!!

Content is an essential part of any website, it should be clearly and concisely written. The information provided should be valuable to the website user and should enhance the user experience of the site visitor. Ideally your site should become an important resource, featuring information about your specific products and services. Product and Service descriptions should be detailed and concise, full of information about your specific products of services. You’re the experts; share your knowledge of your business. Each and every page of the site will need to have keywords and search terms associated to it. We suggest you start with a list of 3 major keywords for each page. The page content for each page will need to contain multiple inclusions of the selected keywords and search terms. As we have already mentioned the keywords will need to be relevant to the page and its content.

3)      Page Titles & Meta Data

The next stage is to make sure each and every page of your site has unique Meta Data including the Page Title, Meta Page Description and Meta Keyword list. So what exactly is Meta data and why can’t you see it on your website?

Meta data is important information which helps a search engine identify and classify your website. Search engines use this information to index your site and its content under the correct keywords and search terms. Meta Data sits within the header tag of the page and is only visible to a search engine. There are many forms of Meta data tag, each has a unique use or purpose but at this time you only need to worry about the Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Keyword list. These tags will be used to create your search engine listing titles and descriptions and will aid in the classification and categorisation of associated keywords and search terms to each page of your website.

The Meta Keyword tag is not used by all of the search engines and has become a little redundant but there are still a proportion of search engines which require the tag to be in place. We suggest that as a result you continue to populate this tag in order to maximise potential exposure.

Title Tag

Each and every page of your site should have a unique page title. The page title appears at the top of the page within the header of your browser. In explorer the title appear next to the explorer logo. The page title is not only visible to your site visitors; it is used by the search engines as the indexed page title within the search engine listings. So as you can imagine, the title tag is very important!

Ideally the page title tag should not be more than 70 characters; this is all that can be displayed in Google. The title tag should be structured, contain keywords and search terms and be contextually relevant to the page and its content. The key is to balance the quality of the title, to improve the user experience of the site, while allowing the search engine to correctly identify each pages associated keywords.

Meta Description Tag

Each and every page of your site should have a unique Meta description. The Meta description is used by the search engines to create the listing description that will appear under the listing title in each of the search engine results. This is an important tag, if used by the search engine it allows you to control the marketable message text of each listing description. This is your chance to grab the attention of a search engine user. Good description text will increase click through rates and conversion which will result in an increase in search engine traffic and popularity.

Ideally the Meta description should be no more than 150 characters and should contain a selection of keywords and search terms which are contextually relevant to the specific web pages content. The description text should be relevant and grab the attention of the search engine users. We suggest that you do not use product or service pricing as this may become out of date. It’s important to remember that search engine indexing is performed at a latency of between 5-30 days, which is dependent on the perceived importance of your site.

Meta Keyword Tag

As we have already mentioned the Meta Keyword Tag is not as important as it used to be, but it is still being used by search engines to help classify and identify the associated page keywords and search terms. As a result we recommend that you continue to use this tag, populating between 5-15 keywords and search terms. Each keyword will need to be separated by a comma and will be added to the tag in the form of a list. The keywords must be relevant to the page and its content and ideally should have been used on the page.