Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

264

• The snippet often excludes titles and navigational elements.

• If the landing page doesn’t include the exact phrase searched, the snippet will

show sentences that include the various words in the phrase.

• Searched terms will be bolded in the snippet, while stemmed and plural versions

of the words (clon

, clon

ing

, clon

) may or may not be bolded as well.

Check Your Snippets

The first step toward optimizing your snippets is reviewing them! To check your snip-

pets, simply open the search engine of your choice and search for your target key-

words. Scroll to your search result and see what you find.

If your website is not ranking in the top 30 for a target keyword, you can skip

the snippet improvement for now.

There may be other keywords you want to check as well. If you know phrases

outside of your top-priority terms that are bringing traffic to your website, take a look

and see if those snippets could use a makeover too.

Your Snippet Makeover

If you came across some snippets that you would like to improve, here are some

possible approaches:

Add text.

Sometimes, improving a snippet is as simple as adding one keyword-rich

introductory sentence to the beginning of your page copy. Be sure that it is formatted

the same as the rest of the page copy—titles and headers may not show up in snippets.

And use your good copywriting skills so it doesn’t seem jarring or “tacked on.”

Remove ALT tags.

One of the less-appealing items in many snippets is repetitive image

ALT tags. A graphic button displaying the words Free Delivery in February! should

have an ALT tag containing matching text. But a tiny graphic that is used to create a

corner on a button does not need an ALT tag stating “white button corner.” The page

will be just fine without it. (Yep, that’s what caused the poetic, but completely ineffec-

tive, “shadow, shadow, shadow” listing for Mizuho Securities Company that we

showed you earlier.)

Change your error messages.

As you learned in Chapter 7, search engine robots come

calling at your website without any of the plug-ins, cookies, or JavaScript enabling that

Now:

Review your snippets for each of your target keywords on the four major search engines. Make a

note of any that you wish to improve in your Task Journal.

slacker

xtra

cred

c09. 8:10 264