Granted, the influence that the meta description tag has on organic rankings is questionable. While the description tag is thought to have some effect, it’s not likely that it has a large effect. So why post about writing good descriptions? Simple, click-though rates.
To begin, lets see how the meta description is used by the search engines. The code for a typical meta description tag looks like this:
In most search engines, the meta description appears directly below the title tag:
The meta description should:
* Accurately describe the content the page.
* Compel the searcher to click through to your website but should not be gimmicky.
* Be no more than about 160 characters long. This is about the number of characters that the search engines display. You’re SEO will not suffer if you go over this length, however. But this is the maximum number of characters that the major SEs will display.
* Contain a call to action: “Sign-up for our free newsletter!”
* Contain the keyword phrases that you’re optimizing for in your title tag and on you page. Any keywords in your meta description that the searcher used in Google will display as bold in the search results:
The main thing to focus on when writing your meta description is to write compelling copy that gets the searcher to choose your link. There’s no sense in spending time on getting high ranking for your website if you can’t get people to click through.
Comment By: Henry
August 18th, 2008 at 4:39 am
Can you post something on what is good copy to use in the description? First Google checks DMOZ for a description if there’s none then it will compile the text from your on site copy.
I’d like to know though how to make a clicker from a browser …
Hope you can post more info on that subject.
Cheers,
Henry
Comment By: Rick Maggio
August 19th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Good copy is any copy that gets relevant searchers to come to your site. All you need to do is write a good description of the page and possibly include a call-to-action.
Google will typically use the meta description for the page in the search results. If there’s no meta description, I’ve seen Google compile text from the page and I’ve also seen them use the DMOZ description. You’re best bet is to always include a meta description so you can control what searchers see.
Hope this helps!