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 Write effective page descriptions and boost your overall success in achieving better search engine ranking results and generating more traffic for your website. This unsung and frequently disparaged task is a small tweak that won’t rock your world but a small tweak that when done properly contributes to better search engine marketing results.
What are page description meta tags?Everyone who works on your website contributing and writing content should know about a few key things called on-page optimization … basically that’s what is found on the HTML content pages of your website. The page description meta tag is an important HTML element that is never seen by anyone visiting your page. But it can be a significant helper in getting you better search engine ranking and clicks. Let’s get started…
Have you done your keyword research?I am going to assume that you have already created a cheat sheet of keywords you wish to target across your entire site. If you have not already done so then back up a few steps, go back to your keyword research output and create just such a list. OK, now that every content producing employee has a copy in hand we can proceed! Writing your page description tags Writing page description meta tags in your underlying HTML page code is not generally considered to be an important part of your on-page content optimization. But it does have a part to play especially when properly done and description tags should not be neglected. Like the page title your page description calls for a careful blend of technical and creative work with words. Your goal is to use the page description meta tags as a way to introduce keywords into our page but also to create content that may (or may not) show up in your listings on SERPs. If you are adding content to your website in an HTML coding program like DreamWeaver then you may occasionally find yourself looking at the underlying code which contains page description meta tags that look like this: <meta name="description" content="Product reviews and ratings"> The technical part of building a good page title involves incorporating your keywords into the title. Let’s do that… <meta name="description" content="Digital camera reviews and ratings"> The creative part of building a good page title involves incorporating your keywords with good density (ie. your keywords make up a more significant percentage of the total words in the description) into the title in a way that still delivers up a good clickworthy link. I love this part…. <meta name="description" content="Digital Camera Reviews – unbiased, expert advice on which digital camera is the best buy for you."> If you are working in the one of the popular content management systems like Joomla or Drupal, or a popular blog interface like Wordpress… then you probably have a the user friendly dialog box style interface where you can enter in your page descriptions. The software then creates the underlying HTML code meta tags like you see above without you having to crack ope your HTML for dummies books and write code. But the technical and creative insertion of keywords is fundamentally the same. The page description you write in your meta tags should not too long because the SERP results will just truncate long ones anyway. When writing try to get your keywords in early (like the first word dude) and often. But try to get it to still make sense as a statement in English… in case the description is used in the SERPs just like you would for your optimized body copy. The possibility of being used is why page descriptions are worth crafting so they not only contain keywords but that they read well... no one sees them, they are not heavily weighted for search keywords, but… - Yahoo still uses page descriptions in some cases
- If the actual keywords are heavily weighted in the description Google may occasionally display the page description – which gives you greater control over how your SERP listing looks and therefore how clickworthy it is.
In both these scenarios your page description now becomes part of your front line advertising. So, its worth some attention. Read More In This Series |
