Monday S.E.O's - Meta Data, Open AI Advancements & Website Hosting

Meta Titles & Descriptions. What Should I Do?

I understand that my newsletter audience is made up of a good 50/50 split between SEO professionals and SEO newbies, so I like to write pieces that are more entry-level from time to time. In my years of experience as a principal consultant, there have been countless times when analysing websites that I've seen the complete basics of SEO missed. The most common being badly structured Meta Titles and Descriptions.

What are Meta Titles & Descriptions?

Meta Titles - Meta titles, or title tags, are the titles for each page on your website displayed in Google search results. These are also displayed on your search tabs at the top of your browser.

Meta Descriptions - Meta descriptions are the text that appears below the title in the search results. Think of this as a salesman for your website on the streets of Google. This description is to inform the user of what the page is about and to show that your page is exactly what the user is looking for.

Best Practices - When writing your titles and descriptions, keep in mind you want them to be relevant to your audience and to Google.

Meta titles should be composed of 50-60 characters so that they don't bleed off of the SERPs. This is usually indicated by your title tag being followed by ‘...’ where it is unable to show the full text. When writing your title tag give a precise summary of what the page is about, include specific keywords you are looking to target without sacrificing on quality.?

Don't just put the keyword as many times as you can within 60 characters!

Your meta descriptions give you more room to work; these should be 50 - 160 characters. Make your descriptions unique and relevant. Where possible include USPs, superlatives and a call to action in your descriptions. you are battling for clicks against all the other results, you need to stand out and encourage action. Include keywords that are relevant to the content of the page and are part of your keyword strategy, Google can highlight these keywords within the description within the search to highlight to the user the relevancy of the page to your query. As you can see below when searching for 'car hire'.

Why Bother? - Even though your meta descriptions are not a direct ranking factor, what they do play a part in is increasing your CTR (click-through rate). When somebody queries online and views your well-built page snippet, telling them exactly what your web-page entails and highlighting the key search terms they are looking for, it gives them clear direction as to why they should click through to your website.

Title tags on the other hand are a vital part of your SEO as Google reads the HTML code in order to catergorise and understand the data within that web-page. This is one of the factors that allows Google to match you for keywords being searched, Writing these correctly can give you a strong ranking boost.

(If I see one more homepage with the meta title of just 'Home,' I might just shoot myself.)

CHAT GPT and The Financial Times Buddy Up!

In recent news, OpenAI, creators of ChatGPT, signed a deal with The Financial Times, a global news outlet, to start directly referencing licensed content within relevant query results.

What is directly mentioned within this deal is that GPT will now provide references and links to quotes and articles used in its query results. This is said to be done with the intent of enhancing the ChatGPT experience; however, I see it more as a key route for TFT to generate more traffic to their journalism. A smart move, in my opinion.

I speculate that in time to come, you will see more media outlets, similar to The Financial Times, attempt to strike similar deals with GPT. Having ChatGPT directly reference and link to their journalism in relevant queries will be a strong route to generate good traffic and brand recognition.

How Does This Affect SEO - I can see this affecting SEO in many ways. Firstly, it only further increases the importance of a digital PR strategy alongside your SEO campaign. If more media outlets start to partner with GPT, referencing expert opinions or directly linking to good publications on your business, This would be a fantastic source of traffic and recognition. If you haven't checked out my short piece on digital PR, give it a flick through here.

However, this does raise more questions about how Open AI plans to pan out further partnerships like this in the future.

Will they start to link to other sources of relevant content like search engines do without licensing partnerships in place? Will they only refer to licensed content that they are within partnership with?

Only time will tell as this model continues to be tested and improved but I expect many more benefits to come.

Does Changing Web Hosting Provider Affect Your Rankings?

In short... Yes, but not in the way that you might think.

In recent months, I've had a few clients ask me whether changing website hosts will cause any setbacks or disruptions to their campaigns. The short answer is yes, but it is dependent on whether certain factors are affected by the change.

Site Speed - Site speed is probably one of the most important factors. Google wants to rank websites with great user experiences, and site speed is a direct ranking factor. If your website takes too long to load on either desktop or mobile, it can negatively affect your rankings.

Hosting Types - Different hosting types can affect your SEO, not only from a direct ranking factor perspective but also from a brand perspective. Free hosting, such as Squarespace or Wix, should be avoided at all costs. While this may be suitable for personal sites, for businesses, it raises immediate alarm bells for prospective customers. Shared Hosting - Shared hosting is great for new sites or beginner businesses; however, as the name implies, shared hosting means you share resources with other websites. If one of these sites experiences a large traffic spike, it can affect the load times of your site, leading to higher bounce rates and lower rankings.

Server Up-times - Similar to site speeds server up time is what it sounds like. How often your website is up and live. When choosing a website host ensure that they can guarantee a server up time of 99% or higher (most do these days). Google wants to promote website that offer great user experiences. Websites that are frequently down can be penalized resulting in lower rankings and therefor less traffic

Overall, if you are considering changing your website host take the necessary steps to make the change has as minimal impact as possible.

Until next week

Oliver Eardley - Principal Consultant