Nothing major today, just more of an observation that I followed through and experimented on and would like to share with you. One common trait you’ll find in successful search engine marketers is that they are never satisfied, even when they have #1 position. I had been reading what Eli had been doing, using special characters to increase SERPs CTR, essentially experimenting to make your site stand out. When I tried playing around with my title, I managed to grab myself about 2-3% extra traffic. That may not sound a lot, but it certainly adds up over time and for the seconds it took to do, was well worth it.

Your meta description, that is displayed in the SERPs is very important and sometimes overlooked but search engine marketers, since it has no direct impact on your actual rankings. It is however, important for getting you clicks, which is why you’re trying to rank in the first place. It needs to stand out, be relevant and alluring. One simple thing got me thinking the other day when I was looking at my description; I was only using one line. I’ve always been a fan of the marketing studies that show the effect of the subconcious on fast decision making, so I thought surely bigger is better.

Lets look at an example:

Here you can see for a search for “cheap laptops”, the top site cheaplaptops.org.uk takes up more space than the second place, val-u-computers.co.uk. I experimented on my site and I found that by re-writing my description to take up two-lines, I consistantly got another ~3% extra traffic.

Consider these two small things, using special characters in your title and making full use of your SERPs description, change both takes about 2 minutes and you could take yourself from 10,000 visitors per month to to almost 11,000 just by these small changes. Out of those extra 1,000 visitors a month, maybe a couple have high ranking sites and decide to link to you, so you’re finally top for cheap laptops? (One for you, Gedge)

The last thing I’ll point out is if your Google SERPs description is being pulled from ODP (i.e. you submitted to DMOZ) you can disable DMOZ snippets by putting this in your code header:

That’s all for now, as usual have an experiment and let me know how you get on!