Search Engine Optimisation Training Course

Lesson No.13 - Optimising the Meta Description Tag

by Bruce Gow Search Engine Guy Pty Ltd
http://www.searchengine-guy.com.au

The Meta Description
This meta tag is diminishing for SEO, but not so for conversion. Meta Tags, in particular Meta Keywords and Meta Description don’t carry the value they used to have.

What is the Meta Description?
The Meta Description is a small piece of text (maximum 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. Up to the last algorithm shift, 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 less as a ranking factor, where most of 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:

The description was a little longer in my actual coding, so I will have to alter it to gain more relevancy.  Here it is unchanged below:

<meta NAME="description" CONTENT="NRMA Offices - National Roads and Motorists Association or N.R.M.A. Service Centres for your vehicle in Sydney, Blue Mountains, Canberra, Central Coast, Gosford, Newcastle, Woolongong, New England, North Coast, Northern Rivers, Southern Highlands, NSW">

Why do I talk about the Meta Description?
Since I said it’s no longer that 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 guarantee that Google may use it as snippet for your page!

Here's more proof...
I wrote a page on my mortgage website about an act of parliament in the US called the "Housing Recovery Act 2008" as a test. Here is what I wrote as my description;

This is what appeared in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for the search term, "Housing and Recovery Act of 2008"

My meta description was completely ignored!  Google chose to pick up "Housing and Recovery Act of 2008" in the content of that page, even though that exact phrase was contained in my description.

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.

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 campaigns 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. If you are new or have very limited knowledge about PPC or how to write an ad, I suggest you read my next mini PPC Course.

Exercise
Meta Description can’t really help your site from a SEO stand, but can harm it if it is used incorrectly. 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 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, or you leave that space blank, don’t go half way or it may work against you.

1.   Learn How to Sort Out the Competition
2.   Do Your Keyword Research Homework
3.   Refining Your Keywords
4.   Evaluating Ranking Difficulty
5.   Mapping Your Site Structure
6.   Understanding Links & PageRank
7.   Sculpting Your Site Structure
8.   Cascading Style Sheet Design
9.   Using Wordpress for SEO
10. Setting up Your Analytics
11. Engineering the Title Tag
12. Optimising The Content
13. Optimising The Description Tag
14. Building Internal Links
15. SEO & Images
16. OnPage Analysis Using IBP
17. Link Building 101
18. Beating Your Competition
19. Building External Links
20. Using Structured SEO

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