all 14 comments

[–]johnmu 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Good titles & descriptions are some of the easiest wins you can get on webpages. We did a round of site-reviews for some NPOs recently, and the number one item that came up for almost all of them was that what they cared about wasn't front & center on their pages, and reflected in their meta-data. How are search engines supposed to guess what you want your pages to rank for?

[–]theeastcoastwest 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Its all good practice, and should be done, but in my experience; on-page SEO has much less impact than it used to. Trying to rank a single page for a competitive keyword takes good content and solid backlinks. That said, nailing on page will only give you an advantage.

Now, for large scale sites with thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pages, I'd make the argument that onpage is going to have a greater overall impact than anything else, including links. Implementing proper schema and directing the flow of pagerank well on large scale ecomm-type sites is going to have a greater impact than getting a handful of backlinks to some awesome post.

For local SEO, things like proper NAP display can have tremendous impact as well.

All things considered, on page is very much alive and well but when it comes to ranking single pages there seems to be a tremendous bias towards backlinks and content now.

I guess what I'm saying is that everything is important, and that falling into the trap of believing you can ignore certain areas of SEO, while still being successful, can be dangerous.

[–]NHRADeuce 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Even if that was the case (it's not) the title and description are what will get your listings clicks. Good titles and descriptions will increase your CTR, which is the goal once you rank for something.

[–]Spartangreen5102 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Underestimate on page at your own risk. Once you have a complete understanding of technical SEO and see its immediate impact once appropriately implemented you won’t ask this question anymore. Luckily most ‘seo experts’ have little clue about this (more likely just too lazy), which leads to more opportunities for those who do

[–]jlmetro 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"...on page seo is dead...title & meta description can't Impact on SERP..." I disagree, I have had clients add a phrase, their actual niche for example, and they ranked in days if not hours for that term.

[–]Shilpa_Opencodez 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Following...comments plz !

[–]TuffRivers 0 points1 point  (0 children)

anything competitive will take a lot of work.

But niche stuff you can still rank well with on page.

[–]SEOPub 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No worthwhile search engine has used meta descriptions for rankings in about 15 years. Not sure who you have been learning SEO from, but they clearly have no idea what they are doing if they led you to believe that your meta description is important.

You know what you should do with your meta description? Leave it blank. Let Google pick it. They will pick a snippet from your content that they feel best matches the search query, and they are pretty good at it.