Damburger

Although it is a fairly basic concept, the meta description tag is one that is consistently ignored and/or mis-used.

First of all, it is not a replacement for the no longer used keywords tag, yet on a daily basis many an SEO Company will work on sites and use this simply to display a load of keywords that are supposedly relevant to the page, presumably on the understanding that the meta description can be used to increase a site’s rankings.

It will not.

That is not to say when optimising a site you should not include keywords relevant to the page within your description, but remember this:

Meta descriptions are for clickthroughs, not rankings.

The meta description is the advert for your site’s page in amongst all the other sites listed in the SERPs. In a competitive list of search results, it can be the key to driving traffic to your site/page.

Therefore, when writing your meta descriptions for your site’s key pages, a few points to bear in mind:

• Make sure the text is succinct and compelling whilst remaining descriptive and relevant to the page.
• Ensure that it contains relevant the keywords for that page, they will be made bold in the SERPs and will draw a user’s attention to your link, just don’t over do it.
• Use different descriptions on different pages, it’s ok to use a site-level description on the home page but avoid doing so on sub pages of your site.
• You don’t always need to write a description tag. Whilst they are undoubtedly important on key pages on your website that target high volume searches, if you run a blog it maybe wiser to let the search engines display the query-relevant text from within your article to make the descriptions more relevant to long tail search queries.