Google meta description
Google recently released guidelines on its webmaster central blog for meta descriptions, the snippet of text sometimes used by Google in the search results. They advise that meta descriptions can be useful for increasing the number of clickthroughs a search engine listing gets. They also say what has been suspected by us for a while: that the meta description does not affect Google's rankings, and should only be used to improve clickthroughs.They advise of some good meta description strategies:
1. Use different descriptions for different pages. Google advises: "You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don't have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages."
2. Include clearly tagged facts in the desciption. Product pages might have key information such as age, price and manufacturer unavailable on the page content so it would be an ideal opportunity to use the meta description tag. Google deems this meta description not desirable: (opening and closing brackets left out due to formatting issues)
meta name="Description" content="[domain name redacted] : Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré by J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré"
Google outlines various reasons why this tag is not desirable, including the duplication of information within the tag and the fact that none of the information in the tag is identified: who is Mary GrandPre?
The blog post identifies the following as a much better meta description:
META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages"
"What's changed? No duplication, more information, and everything is clearly tagged and separated. No real additional work is required to generate something of this quality: the price and length are the only new data, and they are already displayed on the site."
3. Programmatically generate descriptions, but make sure they're not "spammy". Use these for larger database driven sites with lots of dynamically generated pages.
4. Use quality descriptions. Google advises to "make sure your descriptions are... descriptive." A little work on the meta description can increase the amount and quality of your site traffic.
At SearchPath we utilise the above techniques to achieve quality search engine optimistation results. Contact us today on 01285 643496 to see how we can help your business.
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