Inbound Marketing Blog

SEO and meta description in inbound marketing: the odd truth

Should you write a meta description tag for each web page? The answer is an emphatic yes – but not for the reasons you might expect.

The meta description tag is a short language description of the page content, usually consisting of 20-25 words or less: about 150 characters, including spaces. It doesn’t appear on the web page.

Most page building and blogging applications encourage you to add a meta description by default. But the Google algorithm will ignore your carefully-chosen words entirely if it thinks it can find more accurate information about the content elsewhere.

According to Google, its “creation of sites' titles and descriptions (or "snippets") is completely automated and takes into account both the content of a page as well as references to it that appear on the web... including descriptive information in the meta tag for each page.”

Crucially, says Google, “While accurate meta descriptions can improve clickthrough, they won't impact your ranking within search results.”

So, if your meta descriptions won’t help you get found, why should you use them? It's because a well-written description can be a very powerful driver to make people follow the link.

Meta description horror

Let’s start with what not to do. Try Googling ‘Harry Potter’ and you’ll eventually find this tiny horror: a true Dementor of a description.

No human has ever written a meta description for this page. Instead, Google has tried to summarise information about it. It hasn’t had much luck, probably because the page has little useful content on it. This often happens when a page is image-heavy and doesn’t contain much text.

The main take-away from this example is that there’s nothing to make you want to click on the link. It’s dull. In fact, most of it is an advert for an entirely different product.

A second point to note is that, when you write a meta description, there’s no point including the URL because Google makes it appear automatically under the page title. Save your 150 characters for the good stuff.

The next example has all-too clearly been written by a human, although not someone you might want to be marooned with:

Remember that Google states explicitly that meta descriptions won’t improve page rank. The person who wrote this didn’t know that, and tried to use keyword stuffing to interest the search engines. Google got wise to such amateurish techniques way back in the 1990s, which is perhaps why it sensibly put this description on page 15 of the search results. Page 15 is Search Siberia and not a place you’d want to be.

Besides being a ghastly example of would-be search engine manipulation, it’s tiring and boring to read. No reason to click on it, then. You want to make your descriptions interesting and compelling.

Meta description misery

Moving from Potter to patter, we enter the world of sales. Here, I Googled ‘job tips’.

Here’s another example of what can happen when you leave Google to furnish the description. The web page, SalesJobInterviewTips, might be superb – after all, the title is exactly what I want – but snappy snippet content must have been hard for the algorithm to find. Instead, it’s left us with a sentence that leaves us...

...hanging, makes no sense, and doesn’t encourage the viewer to click on it.

Remember, even if you rank on page 1 of the search results, you’re still competing with all the other sites on that page. You have to make the viewer click yours, and yours alone.

Here’s how to do it.

Google doesn’t have to use your meta description content, but it did so here. The content neatly sums up what the page is about, which Google likes - but it does more than that. In short sentences, it tells the viewer that...

• it’s about job tips in a particular field
• there are plenty more tips where this comes from
• the tips are likely to be worthwhile (“written by experts”)
• they should take immediate action

Including a call to action in a description is like a good salesperson: at the end of the pitch, you have to ask for the business.

A few final points about writing meta descriptions:

Don’t repeat information that is in the page title. Since it's already in the title, which has been read, it adds no value.

Do include tagged facts about the page like the author, date written, or other information. This gives visitors relevant information about the page that might not otherwise be displayed.

Don't use excessive punctuation. Stick with periods and commas and the odd ? or ! Avoid using contractions such as doesn’t and they’ll as these can sometimes be replaced by HTML code, which isn’t pretty.

Don't repeat descriptions over multiple pages. You want the search engines to rank each page individually.

So, while the meta description won't impact your search ranking, it can dramatically impact whether people click on your page. That's why you need it - every time.