Guest Post by Miriam Ellis whose company offers Local Search Engine Optimization Services.
Earlier, you had my advice on adding meta descriptions to blog posts. Now I share my recommendations for using a meta description tag on a web page.
Meta Description Definition
A “meta description” is a piece of code that can be added to a website or blog to provide custom copy about the page’s content to search engines, which they may then display in search results.
Wikipedia says that the meta description tag, or attribute, gives ” a concise explanation of a Web page’s content. This allows the Web page authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content.”
SEOs and Meta Descriptions
Good meta descriptions may encourage users to click on your link in search results, but they are not technically SEO features, and they do not help with your page or website’s ranking. Also, meta descriptions are more likely to be written for website pages than for blog posts.
However, there are cases in which the SEO will decide to leave off the meta description altogether and let Google do the picking. For example, in a recent project, we added a meta description tag for about 60% of the pages and left them off about 40%.
Let me give you a scenario of two pages, using your nonprofit SCORE Chicago, which gives small business advice, as an example.
Useful Meta Description for Web Page:
Imagine a page on the SCORE Chicago website about a small business seminar in Chicago at the Hilton Hotel. The titles, tags, content and link anchor text pointing to the page all reference the terms “small business seminar, chicago, hilton hotel”. In such a case, I would be likely to write this meta description tag:
Don’t miss the small business seminar coming up in Chicago at the Hilton Hotel on February 10, 2010. Accredited speakers help you grow your small business.
Suggest No Meta Description for Web Page:
Now consider a page about SCORE Chicago business workshops coming up at 10 different locations around Chicago and its suburbs. Each of the workshops has a different focus and the locations are all very different…hotels, offices, rec centers, church assembly rooms, etc. In this case, I might choose to leave off the tag so that Google might concoct its own description for a wide variety of queries like these:
women business workshop chicago
small business help rec center
quickbooks use seminar my neighborhood
small business workshop for crafts industry business
General Principle for Adding Meta Tag Descriptions
If your page concerns many different topics, with a variety of keywords, you may be better off not creating a custom description and letting Google pick the best match to a specific query.
Related Posts
Meta Descriptions For More Search Traffic? Blog SEO Series
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I always add a description because it’s the main thing that shows up in organic search results. I’d just make the description more generic, still using main keywords.