DAY 13: Leveraging On The Meta Description

It’s a start of a new week and we will be continuing on from our guest post series of Search Engine Optimization. We are now over the half way point! To see previous posts, check it our the Search Engine Optimization posts.

“Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.”

- Elbert Hubbard -

Useless for SEO, but not for Conversion

If you have been following my posts in the past, you should be well aware by now that Meta Tags, in particular Meta Keywords and Meta Description don’t carry the value they used to have.

In fact, the situation reached an extend where they fundamentally are both useless for SEO, this is why more often than not, I strongly simply recommend people just to skip them as there are many other ways much more productive for you to get traffic towards your site.

What is the Meta Description?

The Meta Description is a small piece of text (150 characters long) that is used to describe the content of your page as a snippet along with the page title in the search results.

The Meta Description is nowhere to be seen or found on the actual content of your page; it is purely designed for the search engines result page display.

In the past, the Meta description was useful as another place to add your keywords and increase your site relevancy just like the Meta keywords and page title.

As SEO evolved, both the Meta keywords and Meta description have been rendered useless where all the weight of SEO has been carried over onto the page title.

The snippet used as Meta description is contained in the header of your HTML source code and looks like this:

Why do I talk about the Meta Description?

Since I said it’s no longer beneficial for SEO, why do I keep talking about it and not the Meta keywords?

Well, there’s one major difference between the meta keywords and the meta description; the meta keywords have lost their value and are totally invisible, not to be seen by the search engines (it is assumed that some search engines now directly skip that meta tag), while the meta description is still displayed in all the search results.

Why I don’t need to write a Meta Description?

Because you write your own Meta Description is in no way a guaranty that Google may use it as snippet for your page!

That’s right, Google makes its own decision as to what it consider is relevant to the search query, so even if you have prepared a nice description for your page, if Google doesn’t find it the most relevant to the search, it will then pick one from either of those 2 options:

• From the Open Directory Project if your site is listed there.
• From a relevant section of your page’s visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user’s search query.

It’s also important to remember that if the page description doesn’t help your SEO, using a wrong one can hurt your SEO!

That’s right, just like the page title, Google doesn’t want you to have 2 pages with the same description. Since the pages should be unique and original, so should be their description!

The easiest way to ensure that all your Meta descriptions are unique and always relevant to the content of the page they are describing is simply to skip them.

That’s right, by not setting up a meta description for your pages, you are forcing Google to generate one for you, and if Google does the job for you, you can be sure that it will agree that this description is the best it can come up with for the matching search query based on your content, and will be unique for each of your pages.

I can do better than Google

The truth is using this method will save you a lot of time regarding those Meta description, until you find the time (if you find it worth)
to add a really good page description that could help your conversion rate.

So, if you ever where considering to write your own Meta description, how this one should be?

The biggest mistake you could make would be simply to describe the content of your page!

At this very moment, this is where you have to leverage on the other side of SEO, and that’s SEM (Search Engine Marketing).

Pay Per Click campaign like Google AdWords are only successful if you know how to write a real good ad matching a really good keyword.

Now, tell me why this should be any different with your organic
listing?

At this point the only difference is that one listing (the PPC) you must pay for, while the other is provided free for you.

Not only that, organic listing allows you more characters than in PPC.

Now you are starting to understand where I’m heading to, that’s right I want you to write your description like you would with a PPC ad!

Write a description with your visitors in mind, not the search engines.

I mean, would you rather click on this listing:

“Traditional Chinese Gifts page.”

Or:

“This page is about the products I have in my online store such as traditional Chinese gifts and other related Asian gifts for you to offer as gift or use as personal decoration item.”

Or the following one:

“Get respect and acceptance from Asian families with our traditional Chinese gifts. Free worldwide express delivery, 100% satisfaction guaranty or your money back. Call 1-800-666-3245 now!”

Exercise

Meta Description can’t really help your site from a SEO stand, but can harm it if used wrong. Nonetheless this is an important element of your site display in the search results and thus should be given a bit of consideration if you have the time.

Your task today is to make sure that your pages descriptions are good the way they really should be, or you should remove them.

If your site is new, you should spend some time to write nice PPC ad style descriptions for your pages.

Either you write a good page description, either you leave that space blank, don’t go half way or it may work against you.

If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to share your thoughts online about this lesson below.