Search with Design

I was reading a thread about meta tags on the DigitalPoint forums today.

.NET magazine wrote an article on SEO recently and stated that meta tags no longer matter for search engine optimization. Were they correct to do so?

The SEO industry is in state where most of the mechanical aspects of optimization can be handled by a competent web designer who stays on top of the basics (.htaccess, robots.txt, static URLs), which is why we see so many design firms now touting that they can perform SEO while designing a site.

So that takes care of the ’search engine’ part of SEO. But what about optimization?

Search engines (specifically Google) still use meta tags, but not to rank your site. At least not directly.

Let’s start with three statements:

Fact 1: Google has access to your meta- title and description tags.

Fact 2: Google will display your title and description tags in search results, unless the engine feels that writing its own description from your text, or using your DMOZ entry is more relevant (algorithmically determined, happens less than 20% of the time in my experience).

Fact 3: Google will rearrange its search results by click through rate and other (measurable) factors to provide he most relevant results to users.

You may wish to debate fact #3, but for now let’s assume it’s true in this world.

The acceptance of these three facts means that you need to write a title and description that will impress visitors and increase your click through rate. A better visitor experience will push your site higher in the rankings.

So how do you write a good title and description? Well, that means it’s time to take a page from the PPC-world…

I don’t want to blow the whistle prematurely on a respected website like this one, but Luke brought to my attention yesterday that they ranked pretty highly for the Google search [switch]. Now the page appears in the Google index as “Apple - Switch,” but the page title on the linked page is “Apple - Get a mac.”

Strange.

So, checking the cache date, I notice that the page is 7 days old. Okay, maybe they’ve changed the title. Nope, the title is the same on the cached page as it is on the live page today.

So I fire up the good old Lynx-Borland browser and navigate to the same page. The no-Javacript browser says the title is the same as the live version.

Maybe it’s a backlink thing? My backlink analysis shows that less than 3% of links to the page contain the word “switch.” I wouldn’t think that would be enough recognition to warrant an editorial title change by Google.

Checking DMOZ, Apple has over 900 entries, none of which seem to have this page with the ‘Switch’ title.

So the question is: how does Apple get a different title in their search results from the title their users see on their website, and from their DMOZ entries?