URLs

Changing a URL without implementing a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one will wreak havoc on your rankings.

Content

The changing of content on individual pages can have a big impact.  Even if you don’t change the wording, the CMS may place content elements in different locations within the HTML, causing search engines to understand the importance of some aspects of your content differently from the old page to the new page.

Internal Linking

Changes in how internal linking between pages is accomplished can have a huge impact on rankings for your pages. External backlinks to a page aren’t the only thing that help a page rank well–backlinks to a page from within the same site also count.  Remember, when you are looking at a web page’s HTML, only the first link to a specific page from that HTML can count as a ranking factor. If, in your redesign, you move to or add JS, image, or flash links, you can adversely impact rankings.

Duplicate Content Due To URLs Created By CMS Or Ecommerce Platform

You may also find, due to the way your CMS creates URLs, that you end up with duplicate content issues on the new site that you didn’t have on your previous site. Duplicate content is the exact (or mostly exact) same content found on different URLs and it is typically a negative when it comes to SEO.

Navigation

Changes to primary and secondary navigation can have a huge impact if not looked at closely from an SEO perspective. Will the new site be using CSS, JS, images, or flash?  What was the old site using?

So, there you have it.  For several reasons, changing CMS’s can have a big impact on your site’s rankings and Joomla CMS fresh out of the box (un-tweaked and un-refined by you or your SEO) is not going to deal with these issues as well as you hope.

All of that is the long way of saying that the fastest and easiest way to change your snippet is for your or your web designer to change your meta description tag. The meta description tag should stay within 250 characters, should broadly describe the theme of the page, and should incorporate your target keywords (as opposed to the page’s title tag, which should stay withing 80 characters and should concisely state the thrust of the page as well as incorporate your keywords).

In the description tag, you can put your company name near the beginning if you choose to and it should show up in your snippet–that way, you don’t have to use up any of your 80 characters in the title with your company name.

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.

The vast majority of people who take that path end up spending more time working to get that traffic (and those sales) to their site than if they just spent the time on their own site to make it rank for the keywords included in the new domain names. I mean, if you can’t get your main site to rank for “barber shop cityname,state” or “barbershop townname” it’s likely your time and money would be more wisely spent picking up some SEO knowledge. Do yourself a favor: forget about those domain names you just bought and let their registration lapse when they come up for renewal next year.

It’s a question that gets asked surprisingly often. For those of you reading this who were about to ask that question, read on.  For those who have found themselves answering this question on several or more occasions, there might be a few tips in here that you can include in your answer the next time.

Fist of all, 2 months is not really much time for a site to be online and to start getting any kind of organic traffic, you should be thinking in the 3, 4, 5 month ballpark before it starts kicking in.  Google will probable take longer than Yahoo or Bing.

As far as getting “major organic searches”, it’s going to take more than just time for that to happen. Here at Metapilot, we often get asked this question by new site owners. Besides time, you need to be investing resources into your site’s content, optimization, back links and analytics in order for the site to start paying you back with traffic.

In order to make sure things are on the right track at this point, here are a few things you look at:

First, do the following search in Google, Yahoo, and Bing:
site:mydomain.com (replace mydomian.com with your domain name without the www).

Notice if all of the pages you’ve created on your site are listed in the results of each of those searches. If not, ensure that your site is not all in flash, that your navigation is not in flash or JavaScript, that your default page is not completely in Flash, and work on getting some decent links to your site.

Do each of the pages that show up in the site:mydomain.com search contain unique snippets (the snippet is the link and the description that is listed for each page)?  If not, edit each of your pages’ html to include a unique title tag and meta description tag that is relevant specifically to it’s specific page.

Does the URL (web page address)  that shows up for each listing in the site:mydomain.com search include the www or not?  if not, you may have canonicalization issues to address.  Go  to Google webmaster tools and select your preferred domain, make sure that links to your homepage from within your site all point to your preferred domain, make sure that your designer used your preferred domain when linking to your site from their portfolio, and verify that any directory or other links you’ve been building are also pointing to your preferred domain.

Make sure that you’ve submitted your site through each of the search engine’s local/maps interfaces and that you’ve submitted it to the Yellow Pages, Citysearch, local.com, Superpages.com, and Insiderpage.com

After doing all of that, focus on keyword research, building content pages focused around your keyword research, and on link building.

As far as SEO goes, the use of keywords in the URL provides only a very slight ranking advantage and should be limited to the keywords focused on in the optimization of the page. If a page is about household furnishings in general and you are optimizing the page for the keyword “antique bookends” then it would make most sense to use only “camaro” as the page name in that in the URL.

If your page is specifically about the 1969 Corvette and you are optimizing the page for that keyphrase then it is conceivable that the use of all three of those terms would be advantageous for SEO and for click through rate (if someone is search for info on that specific car).

Let’s look at your specific example of “/chevrolet_classic_car_automobile_corvette_1969… vs. “/1969_corvette.html”. At Metapilot, we would see it like this:

1. Your on-page optimization should be focused on fewer words than chevrolet, classic, car, automobile, and corvette. Not only is that just too many broad terms to use for a single page’s optimization, the use of all those terms in the URL is going to dilute any advantage you might get from adding keywords to the URL. Keeping the optimization for a page focused to a single keyword or short keyphrase is often best and the use of a page’s keywords in the URL is just part of properly optimizing a page.

2. It’s just a bit spammy looking and thus, such a URL could have a negative effect on click-through. No one is going to use words combined in that order in everyday speech so besides looking long and weird, it just feels weird, too.

3. When you are using multiple words in your URL, algorithmically it is best to use hyphens rather than underscores to separate your words.