Meta Descriptions; Are yours in fact “Descriptive”?
One of the biggest things Google is looking for in terms of their search results is “uniqueness”; if you think about it, that’s a very logical thing. If you search for something you wouldn’t want to get results that were all the same. Google sees the world in “pages”; what this means is they don’t really rank sites, they rank pages. When an individual searches for particular key words, Google tries to return the most relevant pages for that query.
So one of the things you want to do is make sure you make each and every page on your site is unique. This helps differentiate them, and makes the stand out. Most people that create web sites think that their pages are in fact, unique! But the vast majority of sites out there are full of pages that are any but. Google does not like repetitive things; they don’t like sites where 5,000 pages all look the same, they don’t like duplicated content and they frown upon sites, no matter how well meaning the creators, of sites that have the same title and meta description for every page. If you take the title, meta description, navigation bars, site template, and any other typically repeated elements of a web page, its pretty surprising just how similar all the pages on your site are. Sure the content may be unique, but if you want to impress Google, and avoid any dreaded duplicate content issues, make each page is unique as possible. Two things you can easily control for this are the page title, and the meta descriptions.
Last Newsletter we talked about page titles and the importance of making each one unique and descriptive to each page. It should be of a certain length and be connected to the main themes of that page. It’s the same thing with meta descriptions.
A good meta description will resemble a sentence, meaning there’s a certain flow and structure to it, and it should be as close to 140 characters as possible, including any punctuation and spaces; and most importantly unique to each and every page to your site. If you want to get some sense of how sites look where the person has not taken the time to do this, choose a domain, go to Google, and type into the search box; site:www.domain.com and you will see what I mean. This is a great command to play around with; it will return each page in a site, and display the title and meta description (if there is one) for each page.
Heres an example of a meta description, including the code to indicate what it is to the search engine robots.
<meta name="Description" content="Leonardo's Pet Grooming service is a full service boutique for all of your pets needs. With each session we shampoo, dry and clip their nails.">
Remember a meta description is not seen by your visitors, it is only “read” by search engine spiders.
Points to Remember;
- A good meta description is 140 characters long.
- Make a unique one for each and every page, touching on the theme of that page.
- Try the site:www.domain.com command in Google to test some sites, and your own.
- What Google displays in the results for your meta description is often referred to as the “snippet”
- The snippet is a great way to get searches to learn a little about that page without having to click on it, so make it enticing!
