SEO and the importance of Meta Descriptions

April 3rd, 2007

I was personally going to blog about this myself this evening, having been in the process of evaluating a self catering holiday village in Blackpool, and noticed the distinct lack of meta information of the site. Whilst the effectiveness (or rather non-effectiveness) of meta tags as regards SEO is now well accepted, they are still useful (much like PPC) in enticing the user to enter your site (apart from other things) and as such should still be considered when optimising a site - particularly if like me you like to be judged by the ROI of the website rather than just the ‘number of 1st place terms’.

However Rand Fishkin or Randfish from SEOMoz has written a brilliant post regarding how meta description tags should be correctly used.

In particular he highlights their three main functions, namely

1. To describe the content of the page accurately and succinctly
2. To serve as a short, text “advertisement” to click on your results in the search results
3. To display targeted keywords, not for ranking purposes, but to indicate the content to searcher

Rand also went on to say

“You shouldn’t always write a meta description. Although conventional logic would hold that it’s universally wiser to write a good meta description yourself, rather than let the engines scrape your page, this isn’t the case. I use the general rule that if the page is targeting 1-3 heavily-searched terms/phrases, go with a meta description that hits those users performing that search. However, if you’re targeting longer tail traffic, for example with hundreds of articles or blog entries or even a huge product catalog, it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines themselves extract the relevant text. The reason is simple - when engines pull, they always display the keywords (and surrounding phrases) that the user searched for. If you force a meta description, you can detract from the relevance the engines make naturally. In some cases, they’ll overrule your meta description anyway, but it’s not always wise to rely on that.”

To read the article in full, please click here to read Rands article on correct Meta Description usage

Entry Filed under: SEO Industry, SEO