Here’s your chance to finally get some answers to your SEO questions. You can either submit your questions by filling out the form below; or, you can simply send me an email with your question as the subject line to: mbmoran@moraninteractive.com.
Thanks for reading and I hope to hear from you soon.
~Matt
Q:
I have a question for you related to the metatag description. Do you think using the first sentence or so of a piece of content in its description metatag is ok, and better than not having anything? I have a client that doesn’t think they’ll be able to devote time to these before launch – If we don’t put anything, my understanding is that search engines tend to return the first few lines of text that they find when crawling the page, but that is not always the content itself (could be navigation items, etc). If we use the first sentence of each page, then at least that’s what would get returned and it would be better than whatever the search engines decide to display? I guess a 3rd option could be to have a generic description (same for all pages), but then would that affect SEO in anyway? (negatively?)
So, how many pages are we talking here? 10? 25? 50? 1,000?
If they have the time to pull the first sentence or two from their content, then I think they have the time to write a BRIEF sentence or two about that particular page.
If it truly is too burdensome to write the descriptions, then go ahead and use the first line or two. Just make sure to keep it within 140 to 160 character spaces. Use proper sentence structure and grammar; and have NO spelling errors. You can help the situation if you use CSS to push the navigation down below the actual content in the code. If they or you don’t know how to do that, then just go with what you suggested and roll the dice. I guess at this point it’s better than nothing.
One thing I would stress, however… If they haven’t taken the time to write unique TITLES and HEADLINES (h1) for each page, then don’t have them bother with descriptions. Whatever SEO tactics have been employed elsewhere on the pages will not mean a thing if they don’t have well written page titles.
Q: Do you know of any site that I can use that will spider each of of my competitors’ sites? I want to get an idea of the size of each of the sites and an inventory of each page within it.
A: If you want to find out how many pages of your competitor’s (or your own) site may be indexed by the search engines, also known as index or site saturation, you could simply use the following advanced search query in Google:
site:www.competitorsiteA.com
site:www.mysiteB.com
Then, if you want to see how many pages are indexed in Yahoo! use Yahoo!’s Site Explorer; however, you have to be logged into your Yahoo! account.Limitations: These queries will only report those pages that are considered to be “index-able” by either search engine. Each site may actually have a lot more pages that the search engines don’t know about or don’t consider to be worthy of their index. Added note: Yahoo! is a lot more liberal when it comes to divulging info about sites in its index. Google will only show those pages it finds to be most relevant.
On the other hand, there are other tools that can be downloaded and used to crawl sites in question. I use and recommend Xenu Link Sleuth. This is a free program that is actually a broken link checker– which in and of itself is useful information- but it contains a feature which provides a list of all pages on a site as a site map. Added bonus: It’s also a good way to make sure each page of your the site has a proper and unique title. It’s a good idea, too, to keep tabs on competitors’ pages to see how they use or don’t use keywords in page titles.
Warning: Depending upon the size of the site you want to crawl, it could take quite a bit of time to spider a site– possibly hours. Also, whether you’re using an advanced query string in Google or a downloaded desktop application, it is impolite to hit the servers with such queries over and over and you could end up getting blocked, so be careful. I know this because it’s happened to me and it isn’t a fun task to get back in the good graces of Google.