This is a work in progess – but the evidence from a quick google search is “Google doesn’t use it!!!” You can’t say fairer than this… or is this too trusting?
And if a video from the “Horses Mouth” isn’t enough for you try this that’s not enough ammo – try this google search …
You might like to read this post on the description meta tag along with the post on the title tag…
The <meta name=”description” content=”Brian the two month old labrador puppy goes for his first walk in the park” /> gives google et al a summary of what the page is about. The <title> might be a few words, the description could a short paragraph. Google MIGHT use them as snippets for your pages. MIGHT – because google may choose to use a relevant section of your page’s visible text if it does a good job of matching the search term. Its always good practice to add this tag, in case the friendly robots can’t find a good enough section of text within your page.
Words in the snippet are bolded (emboldened?) when they appear in the user’s query and so gives the user a clue about whether the content on the page matches what he or she is looking for.
Write a description that both informs and interests the user and use unique descriptions for each page – avoid a single description across your site.
Suppose you have a site with the domain mysite.com. Google will see www.mysite.com and mysite.com as two different sites. This can affect you rankings, although there is (as always) discussion out there about just how much.
Its important to tell goolge which of these is there prefered domain often called the “canonical” domain – personally, I like the www version, so I normally set this via the google developer tools for my sites. Here’s a quote from google themselves:
Once you tell us your preferred domain name, we use that information for all future crawls of your site and indexing refreshes. For instance, if you specify your preferred domain as http://www.example.com and we find a link to your site that is formatted as http://example.com, we follow that link as http://www.example.com instead. In addition, we’ll take your preference into account when displaying the URLs.
Also, as a belt and braces thing I often set a 301 re-direct in the .htaccess file. This then means that should anyone follow a link such as http://mysite.com/apples they will be automatically redirected to http://www.mysite.com/apples – and this is what will appear in the browser window.
You can set the .htaccess file like this
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
#to send mysite.com -> www.mysite.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mysite\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
There’s lots of good info out there on how to edit the .htaccess file – try
Normally when people type into google they either see the contents of your “description” tag or some of the text from your page. This is all great. However, there are occasions when google will display text from the open directory project as the page title and description for your listing that it has “Taken” from this (and other) directories. This is OK, but in some instances the text in your listing might not reflect the key word you are working on, could be out of date, or badly written There is also similar directory run by YAHOO, with all the same possible problems!
I’d prefer to stay in control than let open directories have a say…
You can use the robot meta tag to “Opt out” of content from these open directories being used in your listing/ranking. All you need to do is tell the robots by adding this to your <head> section.
<meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir" />
The “noodp” opts out ofthe “Open directory projects” whilst the “noydir” takes care of yahoo.
A title tells users and search engines what the topic for a page is. Its a really important factor in how goolge (other search engines are available…) sees your site. The title goes in the <title>…</title> tags within the <head>…</head>of your document. Its really important that this title reflects the keywords within your text.
Within joomla I personally like to set the itle for every page via the menu item – in the parameters->system (in 1.5) or menu item->page display items in joomla 1.7. There’s a little check box to say if you want the title to appear on the page or not. I wonder if that’s a good idea – seems to make sense that it would be… or would it be stuffing…
Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content. Avoid choosing a title that has no relation to the conent of the page, or non-descriptive titles like “new page” or “Homepage”. Ideally you should have unique titles for every page – so avoid using the same one across the site. Avoid long titles, or stuffing keywords that aren’t helpful into the title – short but informative is the way to go.
Landform Estates have been working with ee-web design to redevelop their exsiting site to make it more “google friendly”. A careful look was made at all the existing text, file names for images/documents, anchor text, main navigational text, all in the light of suggested new search terms. To improve the user experience “Fact” and “Quote” boxes were added to the site, along with a simpification of the image galleries. 
Read more…
Anchor text is the fancy name for “The bit you click” – and is supposed to tell users (importantly) and google (more importantly….) something about the content you are linking to. As a quick aside, I’d say if you do good anchor text for your users, your doing good anchor text for google – so to say “More importantly previously is obviously questionable)
Avoid writing generic anchor text – like “download here” or “Visit the about page”, text that’s off topic and URLs (although its ok in some cases, like promoting a new site address or email address for example). Also, its best to give a clear visual clue that links are links, so don’t make them too similar to the body copy.
Lastly avoid using long, keyword heaving anchor texts for internal links. As ever, its the users experience that really counts.
Is it a good idea to buy loads of domains, and put small sites on them linking to your main site? You could imagine buying all those domains that have similar search terms, and put mini-sites on them all linking to yours. Googlers would end up at your site by different routes, thus boosting your ranking. Only it doesn’t really… well, not like this
In fact, I have “heard” it said that google smiles on you if you have high ranking sites linking to yours. And in the above scenario all those other domains would have very low ranking sites on them. Even if you have 1000s of links from Page Ranking zero sites (PR-0), it wont really affect your ranking. You’d need to spend time getting all those other little sites up the rankings before they make any real difference.
Probably best to find ways to get sites with higher ranking to link to yours!
Google (et al) do take serious account of what you do with your images, so its important to consider these points as you go along, editing/creating your site.
There are two major parts to understanding keywords: one is the meta tag and the other is density. Keywords are the focus of your content. You should come up with a list of no more than 25 keywords that describe your site’s message. Use your keywords to update your content and to write you links etc. These keywords will help you raise your SEO.
