I just published a new post on my website and it was the perfect opportunity for me to take some screenshots for this training. So this is what I do for 98 percent of my listings.
- I always make sure that I use my target keyword in my post title
- Most times I will use a long tail keyword as my post title (not this time)
- SEE IMAGE BELOW
This is how my AIO SEO Pack area looks when I go to publish my content. Basically I do not fill in any of the Meta Tags. That light gray color text was automatically placed in the Meta Tags by the AIO SEO plugin. So there is no reason for me to make any changes, just click publish.
In the image above you will see the number 36 indicating that those are the amount of characters being used currently out of 60. However this is very important to understand. That number represents the character count of the website name and NOT the all-important post title.
I could care less about my website name appearing in the Google search. I do not get ranked off of my website name, but off of my post title with keyword. I do not know why the AIO has decided to display the character count of a website name, but it can be a bit confusing to some.
Let me be clear, and the above image will show what I am about to say, just ignore the character count number of your website name. As my picture shows, once I retyped my post title which is 53 characters long and under the maximum 60, the character count went to 89.
As long as you know your title is 60 characters or less you are good to go. When using the AIO SEO plugin there is no reason to worry about this unless you intend to change our title for some reason like what I described in one of my last training tutorials about how to get a long tail keyword into a short page title.
NEXT UP = Understanding the Description Meta Tag
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- AIO plugin does a bad job here. Your meta description is truncated. I would rather design it myself.
- In fact you do not know what Google shows to me as the snippet of your post. It is not necessarily the same what you see. So it may be almost useless as you rightly say, yet I always design myself the meta description and the meta title.
- For Bing it is still understood as a good practice to add meta description, so I would not miss it.
But it is true that it is totally up to Google to show what it feels is the best snippet that provides an answer to the search query typed in by anyone. This holds true for description meta that is both not written up or manually written.
About 2 percent of the time I will manually write up my own description if I cannot make it clear enough in the first couple of sentences what my content is about. But for the most part I have been successful doing it without.
I just always remember that Google is going to change the snippet that is displayed regardless of what is written. As long as I can use a descriptive sentence with my target keyword without it being truncated, I am happy with that.
When I deleted that I had no more problems!! :)
