If you’re looking for a reason to continue optimizing your website for search engines, this is it. BrightEdge recently shared a survey showing that 85% of titles in the top 5 positions in Google results contain keywords.
While this should not come as a surprise, it’s a good reminder to keep search engine optimization (SEO) in mind when creating content and designing websites.
While the research itself hasn’t been released yet, we can glean some insights from Search Engine Land’s exclusive cover of this paper. According to their report, all enterprise marketers interviewed by BrightEdge consider hitting the right meta tags as important.
Here are the key findings from the coverage:
- Meta descriptions are found in 95% of the top 10 pages.
- 25% of pages that appear lower in Search have grammar errors.
- 90% of top 1 to 5 search results have consistent capitalizations, both title and sentence case, in their meta tags.
BrightEdge is an enterprise SEO provider. This study surveyed over 300 enterprise marketers and analyzed 10,000 keywords across finance, travel, insurance and retail industries.
So, what does this mean?
While we’re not privy to the most inner workings of Google’s algorithms, studies like BrightEdge’s validate the importance of established SEO practices in content and web design.
A good rule of thumb is ensuring a good user experience. Google’s own experts also encourage you to consider this and think about the bigger picture instead of hyper-focusing on specific ranking signals.
How will a user feel if they see your content? Will they skip it, or does it look and feel good enough to click and scroll through?
Honestly answering these questions, including how your titles and meta descriptions are read, will help you get a good gauge of how SEO-compliant your content is.
Here’s the full feature article from Search Engine Land.
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Editor’s Note: “SEO News You Can Use” is a weekly blog post posted every Monday morning only on SEOblog.com, rounding up all the top SEO news from around the world. Our goal is to make SEOblog.com a one-stop-shop for everyone looking for SEO news, education and for hiring an SEO expert with our comprehensive SEO agency directory.
