Meta Descriptions – How to use them

Sometimes, meta descriptions can seem like the forgotten piece of search engine optimization. Because it serves a slightly more ambiguous role when it comes to improving a website’s visibility, meta information can easily be overlooked or misused when a business is looking for ways to raise its profile. That, in turn, can lead to a significant missed opportunity.

Unlike factors such as strong keywords and a robust link structure, meta descriptions by themselves do not have much effect on the rankings assembled by major search engines like Google or Bing. Instead, they are a means to provide information to potential visitors about what the website is, the information it contains, and why they should give it a look.

A meta description itself is a short sentence, ideally between 150-160 characters, included in the web page’s header to provide information about the page’s content. That description will become the text for the website’s listing on a search engine result page — in other words, the first thing about a website that a potential visitor will see.

Meta information can, therefore, help correct one of the most common errors in SEO, in which websites spend so much time trying to boost its search engine ranking that they fail to demonstrate why their content is worth reading. A listing that contains generic title stuffed with obvious keywords and a string of seemingly random text can encourage viewers to skip the site’s listing in favor of another farther down, defeating the purpose of all that work.

A site with strong meta information should work to present a clear and well-packaged summary of what it has to offer, designed to fit the search engine’s limits. Web page titles should be kept below 70 characters, to minimize their chances of being cut off, and the 160-character length for meta descriptions is important for the same reason.

Keywords are still important, because even though the search engines themselves won’t be paying attention, the potential visitor will. Seeing the words or phrase they searched for prominently displayed in a site description is a good signal that the link in question deserves a look. Again, then, the goal is to work the keyword into a complete sentence that will read naturally to a human being and advertise the features on a site.

When designing an SEO strategy, it can be easy to lose track of the fact that a good ranking among search results may not, by itself, be enough. Obviously, a website that is listed on the first page of results will attract a lot more viewers’ eyes, but whether or not the viewer clicks on the page will depend on how likely they think it is that the site will have what they are looking for. That is where meta descriptions come in.

In 2009, when Google announced that keywords and descriptions in meta text do not factor into their search rankings, a lot web developers lost interest. But ignoring meta descriptions based on this revelation ignores their true strength, which is their ability to bridge the gap between the computerized algorithms run by the search engines and the users who are actually looking through the results.