The dashboard opens up a panel report on your main SEO tags. All these main tags should be nice and concise for good listings. Toolbar help for Pagerank Integrity℠.

• Titles should fully display in search results.
• Descriptions should make up a few unique sentences.
• Keywords should reflect text found on the page.

Dashboard: Title Scores

Yellow

When your title is shorter than 25 characters, it usually means there isn't room for things like your brand or keywords. If you're brand is not important, and all you care about are keywords, then titles that are shorter than 25 characters are probably only likely to consist of those keywords. That can be fine. It's less than ideal if you intend to brand or utilize brand equity for clicks. It can look like a suspiciously incomplete search result, even if it's just your brand. These titles are usually just too short.

Green

When your title is at least 25 characters and as many as 50, you hit the sweet spot where the title is likely to have the keyword focus you want, coupled with your branding. It also gives you room for a powerful combination of a keyword phrase with your branding. If your content is rich enough to support it, a three word combination can pack a multi-way punch mixed and matched in page copy giving you potential ranking presence across them all.

Blue

Publishing titles longer than 50 characters means you are pushing the title length toward the edge where after approximately 64, it's going to get cut off. It's for this reason that it is ill-advised to write a title longer than 70 characters. You are using ample room to fit most keyword focus areas from a rich page, and you utilize all the space that is available to you from display. It's a good length when you want it.

Red

After 70 characters, a title is going to be characterized, at least by some search engines, as too long and potentially spam. The title is not an element of HTML where the container was meant to be stuffed. A title that is too long wrecks the functionality of the latter words being displayed in search results and make terrible bookmarks. Search engines don't give much credit to words that won't be displayed to users or break with standards of functions like bookmarking.

The exception to the 70 character limit is a hard limit at 100 characters. In Trusted Feed programs, you can push titles that are longer than 70 characters but over 100 will break the validity of your document. Therefore, the hard stop at 100 characters is important to note. If you participate in a Trusted Feed program, then it's still advisable to have different versions. The public version should have a shorter titles while the feed version can go as long as 100 characters.

Dashboard: Keywords Scores

Green

When your keywords tag has zero to 12 words in it, it's nice and short. Zero just means you aren't optimized for Yahoo! or utilizing the tag for site search. A low word count gives solid power to the words that match your page copy. If words in your keywords tag don't match your page copy, it's going to be less effective if effective at all. Synonyms or alternate spellings of words in page copy are fine. With more power associated with a shorter tag, it's usually best to keep concise with your usage. Remember to use commas for phrases.

Blue and Yellow

When your keywords are 12 to 25 words, it can be fairly good, again, if they are written using words found in the page copy. You should have few if any repetitious use of the same word over and over. Around 25 words should give you a fairly rich keyword set to work with. It's when keywords exceed 25 total words that the length starts becoming an issue. You are fairly safe up to around 50 total words, even repeating any single word in the set once or twice.

Red

Once the length of page keywords goes past 50, we're afraid the use of keywords has the telltale signs of being too long. It probably either tries to traverse too many topics from the page, lost its focus, or there if it doesn't do that, then it very probably repeats single words enough times that it looks stuffed and contrived. You can repeat an important word up to three times, which should be fine. If you repeat every word three times each, and you have more than a handful, the word count will probably go past 50.

Dashboard: Description Scores

Yellow and Green

When your description tag has just one or two words in it, at least it's there even if it's too short. After you've gotten a few words in the description up to 175 characters, you have optimized the description length. Keywords are not important in descriptions but the text is sometimes displayed to the user especially when keywords are present in the description.

Blue and Red

That makes writing the description a little fun in that you don't have to think about juicing your keywords, but use them to write benefit statements in the surrounding text and show off a little writing savvy. If you write a little more verbose, you are pretty safe up to 250 characters but it is ill-advised to go beyond 250 characters. Longer descriptions are unnecessary, don't buy you anything and imply that you intend to stuff for search engines.

Best Practices, Values and Code by Disa Johnson.

Copyright © 2009 Disa Johnson. All rights reserved.