August 31, 2010

How to Maximise Your On-Page SEO using Microsoft Excel

By Matt Peacock

Really good, unique page titles and page descriptions can really help your on page search engine optimisation. The major search engines can often penalise your pages if they have the same title or description and they provide an excellent opportunity for to add your websites keywords into a key part of your on page SEO.

If like me, you prefer to hand type your page titles and you are looking for a simple way to do them then you will find the following tool useful. On larger web sites I find it easier to do all of my page titles and descriptions all in one hit especially if the site is using WordPress. I already use a fantastic WordPress plugin called Headspace which makes it very easy to add page titles and descriptions into pages and blog posts. I just find it easier to add it all into an Excel spreadsheet first before copying over to my web site. Best of all it is really simple…

Here are the steps:

  • Open up Microsoft Excel
  • Add ‘Page Name’ into Cell A3
  • Add ‘Page Title’ into Cell B3
  • Add ‘Length’ into Cell C3
  • Now go to Cell C4 and type the following formula: =LEN(B4) – This counts the length of the text in cell B4
  • Now add in the names of your sites pages into column A starting at A4. If you have a lot of pages you might be able to do an export of all of the names or copy and paste it from the meta data area of Headspace
  • You can then type in your keyword rich page title into Cell B4 and click on enter
  • Cell C4 will then show the length of this title
  • You can then tweak the page title until it fits into the 70 character or less recommended limit for the search engines making sure you fit in some nice relevant keywords
  • Then just repeat this process for all of the page titles
  • You can then duplicate this worksheet for the Page description (in column B instead of page title). This must fit into approximately 160 characters
  • You can also add some conditional formatting if you want that highlights any lengths that are over the limits.

I have included a diagram below for how to use this simple title and description tool using excel, I hope you find it useful