Two basic questions re. Crawl Diagnostic results

[danfk]

I'm a novice...I've just run my crawl diagnostics and I wonder how important is it to a) Have meta-descriptions on every page, b) Have all titles less than 70 characters?

Thanks in advance. Dan.

[Tompt]

In terms of pure SEO Meta Descriptions will have no effect on your rankings. But they are potentially your first chance of presenting your content to users convincing them to come to your site, so in that respect they are important. Search engines will use page content as a meta description if there isn't one and that can be fine, but it isn't always what you want.

Titles are a little more tricky, if you have keywords beyond those 70 characters they are unlikely to be "read" by the spiders, and that is less than ideal, so it's important to try to say what you need within that 70 character limit.

[IPINGlobal54]

Meta-descriptions are an opportunity for you to instruct the SE's what your page is about specifically. If you leave it blank - they will extract an excerpt that they think applies to the page. Whilst this is ok, it might not be exactly what you want to display on the SERPS.

Use the meta descriptions to make the most of the SERPS page, if you page is about blue widget investment - then your description should have text that is relevant to that term, and contain text that includes or is at least similar to the term - if it is a large page and you leave the field blank - the SE's can pull in a snippet of an entirely different part of the page that isn't relevant at all.

As for titles - If you have old pages that have long titles it can be a bit of a drag redoing them - but if you are continually producing content I would suggest restricting to sub 70 characters from here on from an "adhering to best practices" point of view.

[danfk]

Thanks both of you, that definitely helps me. Dan.

[MarkLoud]

Dan,

the meta description is your chance to pitch to your customer and nothing more. It is entirely possible to throw away the benefit a #1 ranking can give you in click through if you meta description lets you down.

Also for me it is very important to keep within the 70 characters limit for the page title as having overly long titles can not only not read correctly in the search results but you may be diluting your affectiveness on targeting a page for a certain topic both to the user and the SE's