Foreign Perspectives

To get well ranked in searches you need to have loads of the key keywords in your title, description and text which is easy enough to do. After all if you were targetting “making money online” then all you’d need to do is to continually repeat the phrase “making money online” everywhere and you’d be right up there.

It isn’t quite so simple as that of course as the search engines will penalise you if there are too many repetitions although they never explicitly say how many is too many. Presumably I’m OK by mentioning “making money online” for a third time at this point but if the only phrase I’d used to this point was “making money online” then that would definitely attract a penalty. Generally speaking you should be OK with two and perhaps three repetitions but four or more within the title and description would be starting to attract attention.

What you can, and should, do is to add synonyms of the phrase. For example, “making a living online”. This makes sense on two fronts: 1) you are less likely to attract a penalty by using a different phrase and 2) people use different phrases when they’re searching for things.

However, even if you avoid the penalties, you have another complication: whilst you clearly need to write for the search engines, you also need to write for people who’ll come across your site by way of those search engines. Writing entries that serve both purposes well is far from easy. Just how difficult it can be is easy to see once you’ve searched for a few popular phrases such as “make money online”. Many of the sites that come up towards the top of the list have titles and/or descriptions that have clearly concentrated on the search engine ranking side of things to the detriment of readability.

Granted, that’s an unusual phrase as all of those targetting it are very much interested in attracting traffic to their sites therefore it’s more important to be high up the rankings than to necessarily have a truly readable entry. For more normal phrases you generally get reasonably readable entries although the repetition of the key phrases can be quite wearing at times eg “France gites: our gites in France are France self-catering gites throughout France with many of them listed in Gites de France” is fairly typical for a site that targets both “France” and “gite”. Note here too that grammar tends to go out the window: it should be “French self-catering gites” rather than “France self-catering gites” but since “gites france” is a more popular search term than “french gites” it’s “France” rather than “French” that’s used.

The absolutely perfect title & description is rarely possible to achieve in one go and you’re as well to test each version that you use and look at what those ranked higher than you are doing. Generally speaking it takes about a week for google to pick up a change in your title & description so the testing can be quite a long drawn out business, but nonetheless one that’s worth doing as moving up even one spot in the search results can have quite a dramatic effect on the traffic to your site.