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. Thanks for reading and I hope to hear from you soon.
Q: I have a question for you related to the meta tag description. Do you think using the first sentence or so of a piece of content in its description meta tag 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 any way? (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 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
Limitations: These queries will only report those pages that are considered to be “index-able” by the 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. Google will only show those pages it finds to be most relevant.