A few SEO questions for new site

**kingoftherodeo** · 06-02-08

Hey All

I have a few questions regarding my google webmasters reports?

Firstly i wondered about title and decription tags, it says i have duplicate title and description tags. Should they all be different, i didnt think it mattered too much?

Also i have submitted my URL to google a couple of weeks ago and a sitemap however only 9 of my 70 urls have been indexed....does it just take a little time to index them all? I've been adding them daily whilst building the site.

Thanks for your help

**tbp** · 06-02-08

Firstly i wondered about title and decription tags, it says i have duplicate title and description tags. Should they all be different, i didnt think it mattered too much?

Yes, they should be different, and your keywords should be different as well.

The title and description are the main way to describe your page to google, and also to visitors who see these in the search engine results.

For google, they should be different because otherwise it will think your pages are all very similar, even though the content is different, and so it won't pay as much attention as if they were all unique.

For visitors, its your one chance to tell them why they should choose to visit your page / site over anyone elses that they see in the results. If all your descriptions are the same, then you're not selling each particular page as well as you should be, so possibly missing out on potential visitors.

The upshot is, that although it's extra work making them all unique, in the long run its well worth it.

As for your Google indexing speed, it can take a while to go through your site and index everything, some sites never get entirely indexed. However, the more you add content to your site the more google should index it as it sees that its growing, rather than static and relatively unchanged.

Obviously getting links to your site will help, as google will be more likely to index the pages linked to.

**kingoftherodeo** · 06-02-08

Hey TBP

Ok thats a great answer - just what i needed.

I have friday off work so im going to spend most of the day updating those - all 70 pages of it, urgh! Like you said though in the long run it certainly pays off.

Thanks again, i hope it helps me get indexed for something

**MrCatz** · 09-02-08

TBP hit that one on the right spot!

Having your onpage factors in-sync with offpage optimization will really help you get rankings in SERP. Changing your meta, titles, etc. is a tedious task but its all worth it when you see your site ranking for your keywords.

**Steved** · 09-02-08

Another thing you can do is to internally link pages that are of a similar topic. Just having a sitemap is not good enough in my opinion. Each of my pages links to at least a few others on my site from within the content body. Make sure they are relevant links though, just the same as if you were doing an external link building campaign.

**sweetlimes** · 13-02-08

Out of interest what happens if you leave your meta description and keyword tags empty? Does it have a negative effect?

**tbp** · 13-02-08

Out of interest what happens if you leave your meta description and keyword tags empty? Does it have a negative effect?

The keyword tags aren't really used by google, so having none won't have an effect. Some other search engines etc still use them though, so they are worth having.

If you don't have a meta description, I don't think it harms you (but may be wrong, i`m not 100% sure), but in the search results you would have text taken from the ODP (if there is an entry for your site, although they don't see to be adding now) or from the first blocks of text on your site.

It's much better having a meta description, as then you can choose what goes in there and write text that will lure the user into going to your site.

**MrCatz** · 11-03-08

Metas are still given weight by Yahoo. Although being ignored by Google and MSN, I suggest you include them for the completeness of you site

**kingoftherodeo** · 11-03-08

Yeah i've kept them in there for good measure

**bills2big.com** · 11-03-08

Originally Posted by MrCatz

Metas are still given weight by Yahoo. Although being ignored by Google and MSN, I suggest you include them for the completeness of you site

Yes I agree.

**Barry** · 11-03-08

Meta description is never ignored by google and imo is one of the most important tags you can optimise.

Ta

**Alfie** · 11-03-08

Yep, we really underestimated the power of the meta description and are still working back through some of our sites to either implement it or tweak what was there.

By just changing the description, we found we were getting a lot more click throughs - we teste this by reverting it back to the old description and immediately saw a drop in the number of click throughs.

Does having your keywords in there carry any SEO points though? We generally include them as it usually makes sense to, but was never sure whether it would actually help in terms of ranking?

All the best,

Alf

**getvisible** · 11-03-08

Meta description is never ignored by google and imo is one of the most important tags you can optimise.

completely agree! (my comment wasn't helpful - but I'm upto my eyeballs in stuff). if any one wants to ask an seo question then my messenger address can be found on here somwhere.