Excel Tip for Title and Description Tag Optimization

Optimizing the title and description tags for hundreds (or even just dozens) of pages? Obviously an Excel spreadsheet is the tool of choice to keep everything neat and orderly. Beyond the neatness, Excel has a number of very helpful features that make a page optimization project much easier. Here’s one tip (thanks to Josh Dreller for his Excel tutorial that inspired this usage):

The different search engines have different maximum lengths for the titles and descriptions that they will show in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Google will show up to 69 characters (including spaces) for the title and up to 156 (including spaces) for the description.

While many content management systems that enable you to add title and description tags to your pages will show you the number of characters, it’s quite frustrating to spend precious time writing the tags only to find out when you copy them into your system that they’re too long. And not all systems have this feature for all the tags. Our Wordpress-based system tells us only the number of characters in the description (not the title). Using Excel’s length count and conditional formatting features lets you see length issues at a glance. Here’s how:

Create columns for the page URL, current title, new title, current description and new description. Add in a “length” column after your new title and description.

Put the formula len=(cell) into the first cell of the length column, using the cell just to its left in the formula. Copy and paste for the entire column.

You will now see the number of characters (including spaces) contained in your new titles and descriptions.

In order to see which titles and descriptions fit the prescribed number of characters, use conditional formatting in the length column. Here’s how:

1. Select the entire New Title length column, and go to Format>>Conditional Formatting.
2. In the resulting pop-up box, Condition 1 should be: “Cell Value Is”.
3. In the next menu, choose “less than or equal to”.
4. Enter the maximum number of characters allowed (for Google, 69).
5. Press the “Format” button and then the “Patterns” tab to choose what color you would like the cell to be if your title is the correct length (green is a pretty intuitive choice).
6. Press “Add” to add a new condition.
7. For Condition 2, select “Cell Value Is” from the first menu.
8. In the next menu, choose “greater than”.
9. Enter the maximum number of characters allowed (for Google, 69).
10. Press the “Format” button and then the “Patterns” tab to choose what color you would like the cell to be if your title is longer than the correct length (red is the intuitive choice here, but it always seems too harsh to me – I prefer rose).
11. Press “OK.”
12. Repeat process for New Description Length column.

And there you have it: you can easily and colorfully tell which tags are fine and which need some pruning. I guess we have to fix that “Fans” description. Yes, fans – what did you think a company like “Coolness Is Us” would do? 

Any Excel tips of your own? Please enlighten us all!

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