Week 41: How to optimize your page description and remove duplicates for SEO
SEO - Description
You should optimize your page description after optimizing the Page
structure and Title for the SEO.
- The description is for the user. Make a crisp summary of why they have to visit the link and what will be the reward for it.
- Search engines display your first 110 - 150 characters based on the listing page's device(web, mobile).
- Add a keyword to the description contextually. e.g., Github in the image.
- Avoid: Don't use a standard template. It would be considered
duplicate, negatively impacting the search rankings.
Search result
Page's description
<meta name="description"
content="GitHub is where over 100 million developers shape the future of software, together. Contribute to the open source community, manage your Git repositories, review code like a pro, track bugs and features, power your CI/CD and DevOps workflows, and secure code before you commit it."/>
How to remove duplicates gracefully
If you're building a site from scratch, one of the things that you need to take care of is preventing duplicates. It
can be the title, description or URL.
e.g.,
- https://example.org/about-us
- https://example.org/about-us/
If both these pages serve the same content, it is a duplicate. It will negatively impact the search engine ranking. You need to do the following things to solve it.
- Remove the trailing slash in the URL and redirect the user back to the preferred URL version.
- Redirect the
HTTPandnon-WWWversions to the preferred URL version.
Note: When redirecting the user to the preferred version of the URL, the status code should be
301 to update the site's change on the search index.