Meta Description Optimization
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The Meta Description Tag is found between the <head> tags and provides the summary of your website that is displayed in the search results. For example, when we search Google for Yahoo, I have indicated below which part of the search results forms the Meta Description.
Yahoo! UK & Ireland Home Page. Search the web, connect to friends with Yahoo! Mail and Messenger and get the latest News, Finance, Sport and Entertainment. [META DESCRIPTION]
uk.yahoo.com/ - 95k - Cached - Similar pages
Meta Description for SEO
The Meta Description is no longer useful for SEO - due to it’s use by spammers for keyword stuffing, it is no longer recognized by Google as a factor in determining the content of a website. Therefore, while it can’t hurt to get your main keywords in the meta description, it’s value is neligible if any.
Therefore, you are far better off spending your time creating new articles rather than wasting time trying to optimise your meta descriptions for SEO. Although it does still have some benefit for Yahoo and smaller search engines, it’s value is rapidly decreasing, so don’t worry too much about this tag for optimisation purposes.
Usefulness of Meta Description
Although the SEO benefits of the meta description are negligible, that does not mean it does not have it’s uses. Look again at the Yahoo example from above.
The Meta Description Tag provides a summary of your website and is therefore an opportunity to pre-sell the content of your website. Remember, your listing is one of ten listings on the page (not to mention any sponsored ads) so you only have a 10% chance of being the site that the user chooses to view.
Therefore, you should write your Meta Description as a sales pitch to entice your user to visit your website. You should give a quick summary of what the user should expect to find on your page, highlighting key selling points and any special bonus.
You should consider your Meta Description your opportunity to stand out from the crowd and therefore consider it an advert which should be short, snappy and to the point, helping drive traffic to your website.
Keeping Meta Description Relevant
To maximise the benefits of the meta description tag, you should write a unique description for every page on your website. It is common for a site to only have a general description, which is relevant to the overall site, but not to the individual pages.
If you think back to our discussion of title tags, you will remember how we learned that relevancy is the key to ranking highly in the search engines. Therefore, your meta description should be specific to each individual page, not the site in general.
Consider this site as an example. Our homepage meta description summaries what our website is about in general, but if we left that as our description for every page then someone searching Google for “meta description” and being displayed with a summary of this page might not click through, because there was nothing in the SERPs snippet to tell them they’ll find what they’re looking for here.
That’s why we write a unique META description for every page on our website.
Closing Thoughts
META Descriptions may not be useful for SEO, but it’s important to remember that SEO is only half the battle.
Search Engine Optimisation is the process by which your site is found when users search Google for a keyword term. But if your META descriptions are not up to scratch, users won’t be enticed to click though to your website and all your arduous SEO efforts will have gone to waste.
