If you’re not making it to top spot in Google for your desired keywords but you have a great meta description, you might get just as many visitors.
Most people who know anything about the internet are not confident enough to hit the “I feel lucky” button. Most people want choices so they’ll look at a few things when they do a search before they decide to click.
URL Name
If you’re in the top five spot they’ll probably check your URL name and see how relevant it sounds. This is a good reason to be choosy about your domain name.
Meta Description
The few sentences that describes what the page is about is something that’s going to make a bit difference. If you’re in spot three and your meta description is better than spot one or two, you’re going to be as likely as your competitors are to get a click. Look at your competitor descriptions and decide that yours has to be better. Beyond keyword and related keyword proximity, does it pique curiosity and tell the reader that your site has what they need? If not, you might want to play with it and see how some changes work out. A good meta description will help your SEO and will help you get more traffic even if you’re not at spot #1.
About Sean Rasmussen
As far as we see google puts around 3% of importance on the meta tags. It has been observed that in past the webmasters did the trick with meta tags to get their sites in the top listings. Now the scenario has been totally changed. But no doubt this helps with other search engines.
Even it this is true for Goggle it certainly won’t hurt
Hi Sean,
I think it’s really important to use the meta description wisely because it does show in the search engine results pages. This is my chance to encourage a searcher to click through to my page.
Still, I have trouble writing a great resource box and I’m sure my meta descriptions are boring; but I’m trying to make them a little more attention grabbing. I can only get better, right?
Hm. I will have to pay more attention to my Meta description. Thanks for the tip!
If you are using WordPress, there are some great Meta plugins available which make the job so much easier.
Hi Sean
With my meta descriptions I have been using an excerpt from the post. Usually it is a part of the post where the keywords already are. Would you suggest to do it like this or completely write it from scratch?
If you feel the excerpt you choose will entice people to click on your site, there is nothing wrong with using that. If you feel you could write something a little more catchy it may be a good idea to do so Gee.
Hi Sean
Yes I understand that the meta description is important and must have the appropriate keywords to match those that people are typing in when searching.
I will need to have another look at my meta description and I am sure it can be improved. I will run it through Market Samurai too. Great advice, thankyou.
Hey Guys, just so I have my terminology right..meta desription is the first few lines of the first paragraph and meta tags are the keywords in the meta desciption…is this right? So they meta description of this page would be… “If you’re not making it to top spot in Google for your desired keywords but you have a great meta description, you might get just as many visitors.”
Or am I copletely off track? m/
Meta tags are things like the title, headers, description, tags on images etc
I pinched the following from the net.
A meta tag is a line of HTML coding that contains metadata about a webpage. Meta tag information doesn’t change how the page looks; it won’t be seen by the website viewer, unless they are viewing your source code. There are two common types of meta tags — meta description tags and meta keywords tags.
These mainly refer to the title, keywords and description tags. They are summary of the content that is on the page in different formats. Metatags content does play a role in rankings for many search engines.
I have seen various arguments for and against the meta description. However, I’m of the opinion that the meta description won’t do you any harm and it may be beneficial with some of the search engines, so go ahead and use it.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Hi Don,
Good point. It really can’t do you any harm. If someone is looking at the search engine results pages; your meta description may just capture their attention. So, it makes sense to try and write something interesting.
I do read the meta descriptions when googling to ensure that the site which has come up is relevant to what I want to click on. It is amazing how many websites have really poor meta data which is nonsensical – so they get totally disregarded immediately.