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Because a well written meta description can be much more compelling and generate better click through from the SERPs than a random snippet of copy from the page.
Use everything you already know about writing good calls-to-action and apply them to your meta tags and see if CTR improves. If it does (and I bet it will) then you'll know exactly why it's worth it to write a good meta description.
Good luck in your search.
Just wanted to point out that if someone guarantees you first page results in major search engines just by building links without getting any additional information about your site or your target keywords then a red flag should go up in your head about the validity of their tactics.
You might want to expand and define your criteria a little more - what is the state of on-page optimization? content creation? conversion metrics? user engagement metrics? long tail keyword optimization?
Unfortunately, SEO is rarely as linear as build links = 1st page results, and if someone is willing to hire on for a job with those success metrics then they are revealing just how little they understand about SEO.
And for you - do 1st page results for a set of target keywords automatically meet your business goals? Is your website set up to convert the traffic those results will bring? Are you targeting the right keywords? Do you have the content and community built to engage your new visitors and turn them into lifelong customers?
All things to consider before dropping a bunch of money on a link builder with the goal of 1st page results in the SERPs.
To be honest, it sounds bogus. I've never heard of it, and just from a user standpoint, I'd imagine that would be annoying. Let's try that sentence again with what was suggested...
To be "honest" (it sounds bogus); I've never "heard" of it (and just from a user standpoint); I'd imagine that would be "annoying".
Not saying those are the keywords, but how annoying is that sentence to read? From a grammar standpoint, it's giving me chills. Anything in quotes is hinting at something other than what it is... what are we talking "about?" I hate reading through paragraphs where people use quotes out of context. Here's a great example of what I'm talking about: what does this sign mean to you, http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Admin/BkFill/Default_image_group/2012/2/10/1328896276621/cheese-burgers-sign-on-sm-007.jpg? Is it cheese or not? Not sure, but I don't want that burger!
Hi Steve,
SEOMoz just updated their PA & DA metrics - you can read more about it here.
The main takeaway is that in this crawl of the web SEOMoz focused more on getting a broader range of domains rather than crawling deeper pages on bigger sites. If you lost DA then that probably means you had quite a few deep links that did not get crawled and not as much domain diversity among smaller sites.
The main thing to always remember is that DA is for reference only. It is not meant to be a key performance indicator for your site! DA will continue to fluctuate up and down as SEOMoz improves their index of the web and continues to tweak the priorities of each crawl.
Yes, DA is highly correlated to higher rankings, but it's still a very high-level view of a site. If you're trying to get a feel for a random site at a glance, then DA & PA are great. If you're trying to figure out what your site is doing well and where it needs improvement, then you need to dig much, much deeper.
What keywords are driving traffic to your site? How well are you converting that traffic? What closely related keywords to your main ones could you rank better for? What 3, 4, and 5 word variations of those keywords do you rank for or could you rank for? These are the questions that are going to lead to positive actions, not 10 point fluctuations in your DA.
There are far too many factors at play here to really be able to pin any one thing down, but I do have a couple observations for you:
I only looked at the two keywords you cited in your screenshots "how to mac" and "imovie" and really, for how competitive these keywords are you had no business ranking for them in the first place with a DA of 13, even with an exact match domain. Is your site pretty new? It's possible you were getting a test drive in the SERPs (Dr. Pete talked about this phenomenon here).
I didn't look at more than two articles, but the ones I did look at seemed a little thin on content. Great topics, great images, but I'm guessing there were only about 100 - 150 words in them. I have no idea if that has anything to do with your ranking troubles, but just from a user value standpoint these articles could be a little more meaty.
The most effective way to build quality links is through topical, well-written, captivating content, so unless you are hiring a company that promises to write good content in order to gain links a red flag should always go up when they say "link building" and don't mention content in the same breath.
Unless you have some significant on-page optimization and technical SEO issues you should be looking for a good copywriter rather than an SEO firm.
If I am understanding the blog posts linked above (and correct me if I am wrong here Keri) the newest update focused on more root domains rather than deeper URLs.
If your DA dropped then I would hypothesize that it's because you have less domain diversity and lots more links on deep pages from a fewer number of sites. Less of those deeper links were picked up in this update which likely resulted in the drop.
I saw the opposite effect. I have a lot of links from smaller root domains and after losing DA for three or four updates I gained 8 points in this update.
Again, it's important to remember that the DA number is for reference only and shouldn't be considered a KPI or success metric for your site.
Without doing any research at all into "quickseoresults.com" all I can say is their name alone raises a few red flags: SEO is never quick and results is a very subjective term. These guys may provide an amazing service for all I know but my experience has been that companies with names like this tend to take advantage of websites who don't know much about SEO and therefore get away with charging an arm and a leg for some pretty basic and/or dubious SEO work.
Think about what the top SEO firms call themselves: Majestic, Distilled, Raven, SlingShot... nothing in there about quick results, fast rankings, overnight success, etc.
All I'm trying to say is that these guys sound like they are marketing to people with a much lower SEO IQ than your average PRO member, and you might be better off reading the Beginner's Guide To SEO... which I'm sure you've already done.
Using the LDA Topics Tool in SEOMoz Labs reveals that a your keyword targeting is getting diluted by all the other stuff on the article pages... which reinforces Daniel's perceptions of your home page that too many things are going on at once.
I ran your article Chronic Disease Treatment through the LDA tool and found it only has a 51% relevance to the keyword "chronic disease treatment." Your article is targeted well but it only makes up 334 words out of 641 total words that Googlebot can see on the page. I would recommend making simple article pages that cut out all those menu bars and extra stuff and just includes your article plus a simple navigation bar.
Secondly, and more importantly, your articles do not seem to be garnering any links from outside sources. I write for a niche B2B industry and I have the same problem - human feedback has said my articles are very informative but they don't inspire a link because they are so strictly informational. Try using Google Insights to find trending topics related to your niche and then write a topical article that works in a reference to your website.
There are many great articles on SEOMoz's blog (try typing "content marketing" into the search) by people much smarter than me that you can check out, but here are a few places to start:
It's important to remember that "almost the same" can be just as bad as "exactly the same" when talking about duplicate content. Out of all the words on these two pages, less than 50 are actually different - the names of the few products you have listed.
Your products need some unique content to distinguish them really badly. These pages are content-poor and need more products per page and a good injection of original, readable copy.
You're pretty lucky in that writing copy for these products could be really fun for a young intern or entry level person. Just throw them a couple good keywords and let them go to town with how great these Glee or Jersey Shore costumes are. You've got a huge white space to fill there so don't hold back. I'd also encourage you to incorporate other elements like video, social media, and user-generated content - all of which should be easier to generate for such fun products than the boring blue widgets I deal with every day.
It's time to go content-crazy!
This is the last thing you probably want to hear, but here goes: IT DEPENDS!
It depends on how your site is architected.
It depends on what kind of SEO has already been done.
It depends on what the competitive landscape in your niche looks like.
It depends on what your business goals are.
And on and on.
I would recommend you telling us your site's URL and then asking for some advice. There are a lot of really good SEO's on here who will be able to provide you with volumes of actionable SEO intelligence if you post your site URL to this question.
I also work on a large ecommerce site with thousands of very similar products so I feel your pain.
I want to qualify what I'm about to say with a "this is preliminary research and I have no idea if it applies to your niche or if it is indeed true everywhere.... BUT"
My impression is that SEOMoz's Campaigns Tool is somewhat more sensitive to near-duplicate content than Google might be - at least on very long tail keywords like "Airsprung Enigma 5 ft mattress." I came to this conclusion after seeing my competitor rank for several different types of the same commercial refrigerator and on each of the product pages they only have one or two words that are different in the URL, H1, Page Title, and even the product description paragraph.
The fact that Google still ranks each individual page for a separate keyword tells me they are not thinking this is duplicate or near duplicate content (or perhaps they just realize my competitor is talking about very similar products).
Anyway, I could be wrong in that interpretation, and if I am someone let me know.
More importantly, what to do about very similar products:
I plan on following the strategy discussed in this Q&A post:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-within-website-problem
Summary: place many very similar productson one comprehensive page and then write a bunch of quality, authoritative content for that page. This gives you (and others) one central place to link to, one place to optimize, and most importantly (at least for my site) a way to reduce the number of very similar products showing up in category pages when browsing.
In general, option A. You should really have a comprehensive strategy that uses both tactics however.
Option A is only good up to a point. If your site has 10,000 links from low traffic/PR sites and nothing else then that's not a great link graph. Links from a diverse range of domains with varying DA/PA is probably ideal, and any SEO will tell you that one link from a powerful 7+ PR site is worth hundreds or maybe thousands of low PR links. On the other hand, if all you have is 7+ links you probably bought them so that can be bad too. Everything in moderation.
You should also use Option B to flow link juice from your high PR pages to deeper pages on your site. Again, moderation. If you link to hundreds of deeper pages from your home page you dilute the effectiveness of each link to almost zero. But if you combine a link from a more powerful page on your site with a decent link from even a low PR site then you've got a combination highly correlated to higher rankings, especially for longer tail keywords.
So the short answer is C) All of the Above
In moderation....
Do you have Craigslist in the U.K.? Either that or whatever the equivalent would be. All you need is someone who can write good content (and these people are a dime a dozen) and then show them a few basic content marketing strategies and let them run wild.
If you're looking for something professional, Ian Laurie's Portent Interactive would be a good choice. He's a regular contributor to SEOMoz's blog and I saw him speak at MozCon but haven't dealt with him professionally or anything.
Check out my response to a similar question from last month:
"Keep in mind that the DA metric has changed over time not only because of your SEO efforts but due to the Linkscape index growing and changing over time as well. This means if you compare today's DA to DA last year it's apples and oranges because so many more links and URLs have been indexed since then and different weights have been given to existing links in the index.
DA is most useful as a link building metric and even then it is purely relative.
You probably already know this, but just in case you don't I would focus on organic search traffic in GA - what keywords are driving traffic and conversions on your site - as the main metric for gauging your site's success.
If you haven't already, drink Avinash's Kool-Aid!"
I'd like to hear the community's opinion on this, because I simply can't imagine Google is micromanaging keyword penalties like this.
We know Google is paying attention algorithmically to the factors you mentioned - anchor text, page titles, backlinks - but we also know these are just a few factors out of hundreds that determine a ranking.
Really, in the grand scheme of the web or the thousands of other results that also show up for the keyword term you're talking about here, are the tiny changes you made big enough to make any difference at all?
Is the algorithm really that sensitive? I don't know, but I really don't think so.
Anyone else?
As with most things in SEO, it depends.
High domain authority is only one of many metrics you should be using to determine which sites to target for link building. Quality websites operating in your niche/industry/vertical are the ones you should target first. Find these sites, and then if you want to prioritize them by highest DA to lowest, fine.
Also look for sites that target the same keyword groups you do and sites that accept guest content, and stay away from sites that look spammy, scrape content from other sites, have more ads than anything else, etc.
In other words, you need to take a more nuanced view of your link targets than just DA. A high DA site with tons of crummy links and scraped content is never better than a low DA site with tons of original content targeting the same audience you are trying to reach.
Sent the example over to you, but for anyone else that may stumble upon this thread, I'd like to give the answer without giving the specific answer that I sent over to Yosepgr.
If you want to see if the bots can see your content or not, do one of the following:
Don't overthink your on-page, product-specific content. You're not going to get whacked by Panda just because you have a lot of content about a lot of similar products. Just make sure each product description is informative, well-written, maybe a little humorous, and above all original.
Sites that were hit hard by Panda were using mass-generated low-quality content targeted towards trending keywords in order to make money via AdWords and affiliates. Some kind-of-similar-but-original product descriptions were not part of the problem and were not targeted by Panda.
To your main question, you can always write interesting content, no matter how boring the subject.
Take a step back from your products for a second and brainstorm some broader categories that are loosely associated with your niche. Next, brainstorm some catchy, interesting article titles that still reference your products but are about those bigger categories with more mass appeal.
For instance, I write content for a restaurant equipment parts company. Not the most exciting topic on the planet, but I've had success by tracking trends in the restaurant industry like Groupon and mislabeled seafood and then written an interesting article about those topics. I figure out a way to work my company into the article and then put it out there to gain links back to my site.
The good news is since it's such a niche market there's not a lot of competition for the keywords I want to rank for and it only takes a few quality links from an article to get rankings up.
Combine some quality on-page content (without worrying too much about duplication - as long as a decently paid human writes each description you'll be fine) with some compelling articles about topics loosely associated with your products and you should see some improvement in your organic performance.
