A page’s meta description tag is one of the most important elements of your search engine optimization activities from Google’s standpoint.
When you’re marketing your site online and hope that people will find their way to your content or offering, most of the traffic coming to your site will be through organic searches. In a typical Google search engine result, as shown below for the search phrase “hybrid cars compendium”, what you normally see are the page title snippet (from the meta title tag), description snippet (from the meta description tag), url and page size, then the cached version of the page followed by the “Similar pages” link.
It’s clear that Google tends to choose the title and description metas as snippets to show in search results, although there’s a caveat to keep in mind. Obviously Google is not going to tell us what it does or does not do exactly. However Google does indicate that it might use other relevant sections of your page’s visible text if those do a better job matching up with a searcher’s query (in Google’s eye of course). So if you want control then write your own description that is relevant.
According to Google, the description is important because it gives search engines a summary of what your page is about. The description can be a couple of sentences in length and should be relevant to your content as explained above. From my experience it’s probably a good idea to load all your important keywords within the first 170 or so characters of the description. Anything beyond that may get cut off and not shown in the search result snippets.
And here’s a bonus, courtesy of Google itself. You can use the Google Webmaster Tools to analyze your title and meta description against Google’s expectations. This handy tool tells you if your meta tags are too short, too long or even duplicated. Just log in to your Google account, select Webmaster Tools, find your site and go to Diagnotics/Content Analysis area. Then you can fix any problem listed in the analysis.
Writing proper meta description should always be part of your best practices in search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts. It’s time well spent to ensure visitors find what they’re looking for. In summary here are some simple rules:
- Write relevant, focussed description that accurately summarizes the page’s content to inform and attract searchers.
- Write unique description for each web page on your site.
- Avoid descriptions that are too generic.
- Avoid filling description with only keywords.
By the way, because good descriptions attract visitors, you’ll get improved click-through rates (CTR) from the search engine results pages (SERPs), but no effect for your search result ranking.
It’s always a good idea to begin working your SEO before a new site goes live. But what if you already have a functioning site with lots of pages? Should you go back to your pages to redo/improve description metas? It’s probably worth it, at least for those pages with the best/most relevant/unique content.
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Tags: meta description tag, meta tags, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search engine result, SEM, SEO, SERP
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