I am not understanding how to fill in the page title, page description, and keywords. The SEO assistant says to use all keywords in the page description. It would help if someone could give me an example of these fields properly filled in for a page, or perhaps direct me to more documentation or a video that I missed. Thank you.
I found a good reference here: SEO And Style Question, Is there a standard?
So I think I have what I need.
The way search engines work is they want to find the best answer to their user’s query.
“Pizza in new york”
“Hotel in london”
“Best smartphone”
And so on.
Search engines employ a number of techniques to expand the query, so “hotel” and “accommodation” and “apartment” might be considered synonyms in some cases.
They then employ a whole different set of techniques to decide how relevant and how authoritative your website is.
But ignoring that, what you want is for your page to “smell” like it has the right answer for the question.
So what you put in the “SEO target” field in each page in Sparkle is what you would want that page to answer. Not a random set of unrelated keywords, but the search query (“keyphrase”).
You then run the SEO assistant, and Sparkle will tell you how to change some specific parts of the page to match that query, to “smell right”.
If you have different unrelated keywords, turn those into what you think people would search for, and build a separate page for each of those.
Now since one of the techniques search engines use to measure whether your page is a good answer is how fast the visitor clicks the back button (they measure that indirectly but they try to), the page needs to be as good as possible in answering that specific question.
Incredible simple and incredibly hard to get right.
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Thankyou for this excellent explanation!
It is also very important how many characters are in each part:
page title: — 50 to 60 characters
page description: — 150 to 160 characters
key words: I would not use too much effort on these
Mostly it is about wether search engine “see” how many users are watching, how often are there changes on the site/on its pages/… so to see how much life is in the site itself.
# 5 Essential SEO Tips for Adobe Muse Sites
Although this is from Adobe Muse, this one is still the best to see, where do what part of your page title and page description appear, so what is also being found by the user.
So don’t be distracted by this Adobe Muse stuff, its parts are the same with sparkle and with all other web apps out there.
You may also keep an eye on your “HEADING TAGS” (starting on around 5:17) for certain buttons for better SEO as well as look for this so called “anchor text” which has also nothing specially to do with sparkle or muse or any web app but with “thinking like a search engine” and also thinking like a human being, you know?
Let me add, coming from Muse as a user, muse-themes still works and create some great features,
but this is more a message for Duncan, I guess.
And NO (really no), this is not a hint at all to use muse, please - muse is EOL and so to say. not recommended at all. That’s why I moved to sparkle with its features.
Kind Regards,
Uwe
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Sparkle already has advice for specific lengths, and once set the SEO target gives superior advice on the actual content of the title, etc.
I don’t mean to criticize the video, I haven’t seen it, but there is a lot of misunderstanding and superstition (because of misunderstanding), whereas things are quite straightforward.
There’s no magic, it takes effort and time, but what to do is pretty clear.
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Well that video explains, where the different parts of that SEO-responsible fields finally appear obviously in the search results and so gives at least kind of control to look after.
After years, when that video was published, some search engine algorythms might have changed and so to “criticize” the video could only help to clarify what to do better now-2023, but from my sense that is not the case here, because it says just obvious points about SEO in general.
Kind regards,
Uwe
This is an example of a video explains easier and better than just words. I hope Sparkle will continue their intention working with explaining video’s the sooner the better.
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I’ll have to disagree quite strongly on this.
One thing is the informational content, another is the medium.
I don’t disagree that for some people video is a better medium to learn from than text.
But regardless of medium, if the content is incorrect it’s kind of pointless to learn.
Again I’m not referring to that particular video, because I haven’t looked at it.
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Of course the information must be correct and complete. I understand you, Duncan.
From your perspective.
My main language is not English, but Dutch. People who speak English as their main language (French is the same issue), don’t realize that not everyone in the world understand each word they speak or write. In that case it is very useful to see the action and words combined. It helps me for sure!