SEO Quick Tip: Meta Description
Posted on | July 22, 2008 | drew stauffer
Following up on my last SEO tip, SEO Quick Tip: Title Tags, today’s SEO quick tip deals with the meta description tag. The meta description tag is in the head section of every webpage and is a short description of the content on the page.
Second to the title tag, the meta description tag is the biggest influence in whether or not a user will click on your listing. If your description is well written and accurately describes the content, then you can easily increase your CTR (click through rate).
The meta description is usually only displayed on the search engine results page, but can also be seen if you view the source of any webpage. Here are a few examples:
Meta description on search results page:
Meta description in the source code:
<meta name="description" content="this is where the description goes" />
Meta Description Guidelines:
Just like the title tag, the meta description tag has a few guidelines that you’ll want to follow to achieve the best results.
- The meta description has a character limit. For each search engine, the parameters are going to vary. I like to stay around 140 characters with spaces. You can push it up to 155 characters on Google, but you take a chance that your description will be cut off. You can see in the example above where the description has “…” at the end, this represents that it has been truncated.
- Meta descriptions should be marketing style copy. Since this snippet of content is what’s going to entice a user to click on your listing and you only have a certain number of characters, its best to craft your description with everyday language. Don’t try and stuff your descriptions will keywords and industry jargon that could potentially confuse or turn off the user.
- Unique descriptions for every page. Just like the title tag, your meta descriptions need to be unique for every single page on your website. Duplicate descriptions can send the wrong message to Google as well as your users. Google might think that the pages are duplicate and only index one page. A user can get confused because both listings look identical and they may simply skip over them completely.
Use those helpful site operators to analyze all of your meta descriptions in one swoop. Type “site:www.yourdomainname.com” into Google without the quotes and read all of your descriptions.
Are they an accurate representation of what content is on the page? Do they entice you to click on the listing? If not, then go back through your pages and re-write them.
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