Knowing that, (and taking for granted that you’re already familiar with keyword research)  focus on one or two keywords or a single keyphrase per page and use that keyword/keyphrase near the beginning of your title.  Also use your keywords/keyphrase in several locations in the text of the page including in an h1 heading and once or twice in each of the first few paragraphs.

limit your title tag to 85 characters or less

limit your title tag of each page to include only the keyword/keyphrase, one or two geographic placenames, and the company name (use the company name at the end of the title).

Balancing all of the above factors and still keeping your page title under 85 characters (including spaces) is what will set you apart from your competitors.

Your meta description tag shouldn’t be longer than 200 or so characters and using a properly constructed sentence or two, it should broadly describe the theme of the page, it should employ your keywords, some keyword variations, thematically relevant terminology, and perhaps, even a call to action.  Your meta description makes up a substantive portion (if not the entire portion) of the snippit of info that lies below your link in a page’s listing the search engine results page.

If your site is a year old or less,  it is still very young compared to most of your competitors.  While your site is maturing, work on some of your social media profiles like yelp, merchant circle, kaboodle, twitter, linkedIn, and Facebook.  Develop those profiles fully, get yourself well-versed in how to make full use of those platforms, and use those sites as a means of networking and very gentle marketing.

When you’ve finished with the most important parts of your on-page optimization and in between working on your social media profiles, do this search on Yahoo: link:www.domain.com (replace “domain.com” with individual domain names of competitors that show up in Google’s results for your target keyword searches).  The results of those link:www.domain.com searches will show you what websites are linking to your that competitor.  While many of those links will be worth little or nothing, some of them will have value–a rough guide is simply does the page that contains the link have any pagerank at all–and if it does, see if that site will include a link to your site as well.  (The whole link building topic is too complex to be discussed in any detail here, but call us at Metapilot if you want more help in that area).  Besides sites with some page rank, focus on ones that are local to your location.

Since all your traffic won’t come directly from the algorithmic search results, on’t forget to get your site included in the local business/local search/maps feature that Google, Yahoo, and Bing provide.  Make sure you get your site listed in those places and to help you show up near the top of those local listings, make sure you submit your site to these places: yellowpages.com, superpages.com, citysearch.com, local.com, and infospace.com.

The Page Just Isn’t Being Crawled That Often
If the search engine’s cached version of the page is an old version of your page (You can tell by doing a search that usually brings up the individual page in question as a result and then clicking on the “Cached” link at the end of your snippet–the page that then shows is going to be the version of your page that the search engine saw the last time it crawled your site, aka, the cached page.), and the snippet is from an old version of your page, it is most likely that the page has simply not been crawled by the search engine since the new version of the page replaced the old one. When the search engines do crawl the new one, the snippet will likely change (if you’ve revised the text on the page and/or the page title and meta description) and the cached version of the page will be updated.

Stuck With a Yahoo Directory or DMOZ Snippet
If the search engine’s cached version of the page is a new version of your page but the snippet and the link don’t look anything like the new page’s title and meta description then, in most cases, your snippet is being pulled from either the your site’s listing in the Yahoo directory or the DMOZ directory. This occurrence is seen less often than it once was but we still see it here at Metapilot from time to time. If that is the case, first go to the Yahoo Directory and search for your business name and domain name (minus the www) and see if your business comes up as a result. If it does, edit or have your web designer edit your site’s homepage by adding this meta tag below your description meta tag: . If not, go to the DMOZ directory and search for your business name and domain name to see if your site comes up as a result for one of those searches. If so, edit your homepage’s html by adding this meta tag beneath your meta description tag: . Once you’ve added one or both of these meta tags it can take a week or two to a month or two for your snippet to be corrected.

Redirects
Other reasons for the search engine snippet to be out of sync with what you may consider to be the current version of the page, such as domain masking or meta refreshes are beyond the scope of this post but contact me if the other fixes didn’t work and you need to look at other options.

Regardless of which fix you need, it is the time it takes for the search engine to return to your site to see the revised data that will determine how long it will take for the fix to become evident in the search results. I’d say the average time between crawls for a typical site with a small number of links is between one to three months. That amount of time is influenced by you website’s popularity and authority (i.e., how many other websites are linking to your pages within your site and how important do the search engines think those pages that link to you are. More links from sites that are of greater importance will mean that your site gets crawled more often.