There is a lot more to securing first-place and first-page rankings than in-bound links and personal connections. To understand that you will need to research the mechanics of SEO and more specifically the meta-data of your websites individual pages. We have looked at analyses of the top listings and drawn some conclusions to help your website dominate the search results pages.

Meta-data (page title and description) was once the single-most important factor in search placement, but not any longer. Meta-data has now been reduced in importance becuase sites uses sneaky SEO practices to stuff keywords into Meta-data to gain ranking.  Now, the title tag and description tag are key and here is what to do with them.

There are some general best practices for meta data. First and foremost, it is imperative that each page feature unique (not replicated elsewhere) titles and descriptions that reflect the content on that particular page. Another best practice is to write for readability and the optimal user experience – meaning it should be descriptive and appealing to users. Finally, since there is limited virtual “real estate” on search engine results pages, the length of titles is limited.  Something you should also pay close attention to is that Google does not always return the description that is available on the website, but often returns a content section from the page that most closely matches the users’ specific query. That being said, there are times when the description is used – so we’ll look at that as well.

These “best practices” are easier said than done, of course. But by looking at the search results pages periodically, and, more specifically, at the first-page results (and the first few listings), we can gain an idea of what’s working – or at least what’s most important to the search engines.

To conduct your own test, make sure you are not "logged in" to Google or Bing, as that can influence the search results.

Google Test

Keyword Phrase: Romantic Valentines Ideas
We found that in the top ten listings were using the maximum allowable length for titles on Google. The average title length of the ten sites returned was 44 characters with spaces. Just one site on the search results page for this query did not have either the title or description provided on the site. The maximum description length on this query was 160 characters (with spaces) and the lowest was just 80 characters. The average description length was 138 characters.

Search Engine: Bing

Keyword Phrase: Romantic Valentines Ideas
Bing actually did a better job of providing a more universal search experience. The first listing was actually a section dedicated to news (one primary listing, two secondary listings – titles only), and had a section dedicated to related images. Also, unlike Google, Bing provided its related search area under the second organic listing. Finally, Bing featured an indication of the freshness of results with two that were indicated as published within the past one day.

Every listing on Bing used the title provided by the website listed. Just one of the ten sites returned (consequently, a Google Blogspot site) featured the exact description provided by the site. The average title length on Bing was 45 characters (with spaces) and the average description length was 136. Five listings used the maximum allowable description length, and just one listing used the maximum title length.

*study results from Website Magazine