This post is going to reveal a first for Naked Creativity – the first of our in-house tools to go public. So without further ado, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the search engine results preview tool (SERP)…
Fanfare aside, you’re probably asking yourself what on Earth this tool does and why should I use it?
To answer this, you need to understand why titles and descriptions are important to optimising your website for search engines (they also bring additional benefits such as improved usability and accessibility for users but that’s another post for another day!).
Page Titles
The page title is designed to help users identify the contents of a document without having to actually open the document and should therefore make sense when taken out of context.
Search engines use the title in the way it was originally intended for humans to use; by examining the title in conjunction with the contents of the page they try to determine the page theme and context which all feed into their ranking algorithms.
When writing a page title, it is important to incorporate the keywords and phrases that your target customers are using to try and find the product/service/information your page contains.
Key points for page titles
- Include the relevant keyword/ phrase once
- Aim for around 66 characters
- Make sure the page title makes sense when taken out of context
- Each page title should be unique
Page Descriptions
The page description is not actually shown on the web page itself, but instead is contained in the code that makes up the webpage. The meta description is not used by search engines to understand the web page, although a unique well written description on each page is an indicator that the website is likely to be of a reasonable quality which will help the site perform better as a whole.
Key points for meta descriptions
- Aim for around 156 characters
- Each page description should be unique
- Think of the description as ‘mini pitch’ for the page
- Keywords used in the users query will be bold in search results
The title and description are still overlooked as part of many new website builds. They constitute a very small part of a webpage in terms of the actual coding required and therefore tend to be filled in with little thought or effort because having to research and write a good title and description for most, if not all, of the pages on a website is a significant undertaking. However, well-written titles and descriptions, in conjunction with other website development and SEO best-practice, will pay dividends over the lifetime of the website.
Our SERP tool helps with this process in mimicking how your webpages will appear in the standard Google search results, and we use this tool in-house to test the titles and descriptions we write as part of our search engine optimisation process.
It’s no secret that tools like this already exist out there, but ours differs from others in allowing you to save and then export your suggested titles and descriptions to a CSV file – useful for sending on to clients for approval or web developers for implementation. In keeping with the Naked philosophy we have kept the design quite simple, so we have deliberately stayed away from allowing you to add in keywords or site links to preview, which would clutter up the tool and (from our perspective) provide little value in the title and description writing process.
If you have any questions, comments or bug reports please let us know in the comments section or give us a tweet.