Four SEO Tips to Help You Think Like Google - Meta Descriptions Still Matter
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You’ll find some lively debate on this topic in our SEO Chat forums. A recent post from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog seems to indicate that meta descriptions still have their purpose. They may not get you to the top of Google, but they frequently turn up as a description of your site in the SERPs. In other words, they’re seen by web surfers who have just performed a search and are deciding which link to click. Don’t you want to give them more incentive to click yours?
The meta description goes into HTML code for each page in your web site, and it looks like this:
META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”informative description here”
According to Raj Krishnan of Google’s Snippets Team, Google actually does care about meta descriptions because they “want snippets to accurately represent the web result.” When the descriptions give users a clear idea of the page’s content, Google prefers to use the meta description. Keep in mind that a good meta description is not “comprised of long strings of keywords.” It won’t affect your ranking within the search results either – but it could affect your click-through, and that’s what really matters.
A good meta description tells the reader what that page is about, or what they can do on that page. For example, Google Video’s meta description says “Search and browse all kinds of videos, hosted on sites all over the web, including Google, YouTube, MySpace, MetaCafe, GoFish, Vimeo, Biku, and Yahoo Video.” Make sure you write a different meta description for every page on your web site. Do you have a web site with too many pages to do that? Then prioritize which ones get a meta description rather than creating boilerplate that will do for all of them; Krishnan notes that Google is less likely to display boilerplate descriptions. He says that site owners should “at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages.”
A well-constructed meta description doesn’t have to be in sentence format. It can simply be structured in a way that tags all the information related to the page. Even there, though, you should avoid duplication and keyword stuffing. Krishnan used the example of a meta description for the seventh Harry Potter book, taken from a product aggregator. It mentioned the book’s title (which had already been used in the title tag for that page), and used the author’s and illustrator’s names twice without identifying who they were. Krishnan then showed a better version:
META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages"
Why is this better? “No duplication, more information, and everything is clearly tagged and separated,” Krishnan explained. This kind of description can be useful for site pages that list products; you can put everything important in one place, rather than have it scattered all over the page, hard for Google to find. You’ll find more information about meta descriptions at the actual blog entry.
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