Have you ever carried out a Google search and been presented with a list of URLs and some incomprehensible text under each URL? Did that text make you want to visit the website?

The text I’m talking about it called your “meta description”. This is the text that appears under your site’s URL on the search results page (SERP).

Although at first it might be tempting to stuff this full of keywords, it’s far better to write your description for humans first and search engines second. This is your 160-character-chance to give the reader a reason to visit your site.

Let’s take a look at an example:

In the example above, I’ve searched for “website design Sydney” in Google. The top result in this image has used exactly 160 characters in their meta description to give a brief intro to the company. Info that can’t be gathered from the URL name alone.

The second result has been written for search engine robots rather than humans. It’s been the victim of a keyword-stuffer! This may help it climb up the rankings but doesn’t really tell the reader much and makes it difficult to read. Plus it’s full of incorrect language – e.g. “Need professional website designer in Sydney, creative web site design at an affordable web design rate?” – plenty of keywords but you wouldn’t want these people to be writing the copy for your website if they can’t string a proper sentence together!

While looking at these, also note the importance of the page titles themselves. Each of these titles features the searched-for keywords. The earlier they appear in the title, the higher kudos they receive from Google. If your company name does not contain keywords in itself, you don’t want to be using up this prime real estate with your company name when it could be better used for important keywords.

Getting your meta description right in combination with your page titles will greatly help to improve your search ranking results. Although don’t forget that the page itself must contain good content that’s relevant to the keywords used to find it!

Posted on November 17th, 2009 by Mark Lincoln
Filed under: Marketing