Ignore This One Thing and Google Won’t Work

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April 22, 2011 By 5 Comments

Most people in the online marketing industry will tell you that Google is an important source of traffic for your business website.

Although I often meet with customers who get this, a lot of them still don’t have a clue what custom meta-descriptions are or why they’re important.

The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the Head section of a Web page. It is usually placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag, although the order is not important.

E.g.View source jontusmedia com

This creates this result in Google:

Jontus media Google Search

The folks at Copyblogger Media, who make the SEO WordPress plugin Scribe, reckon approximately 150 characters is all you’ve got for this space.

Add New Post Jontus Media WordPressUsing this technique you can do you best to ensure that Google will enable your page (or blog post) descriptions work much harder to entice readers through to your site.

For example I wrote a custom meta description for this services page:

Engelsk copywriter Google Search

I like to tell customers to think of the meta description tag as something that, together with the post title, is meant to encourage them to click through to the site.

What if You Don’t Write a Meta Description?

The risk is that Google will just pull a meta description based on the content of the page if you don’t write a custom one yourself and this won’t necessarily look good in Google’s search engine results.

Sure, the title is probably more important in persuading someone to click the link, but correct descriptions help.

Should You Get Hung Up on SEO?

Scribe tends to recommend that you should put your keyword phrase at the start of the title tag AND the meta description but I don’t worry too much about that. Instead, I try and focus on writing a compelling description. Sure, it helps if the keywords are at the front but I don’t lose sleep if its’ not.

How Do I Write Custom Meta Descriptions

A lot of the premium WordPress themes like Thesis and Headway allow you to write a custom description. So does the Scribe plugin. You can also use the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress.

If, like a customer I was working with uses a content management system that doesn’t allow for this, you need to find an alternative solution. As we audited his site we discovered his CMS was generating the same meta-description for everyone of his site’s pages.

That was a bit of a pain !

Filed Under: seo
About Jon

Marketing and Communications Consultant. Head of Jontus Media. Podcaster. Life-long Liverpool FC supporter. Guarded by basset hounds.

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  • http://twitter.com/neicolec Neicole Crepeau

    Good post, Jon. Thank you for sharing that! I always craft a good meta description that clearly states what my post is about, but hopefully in an enticing way. It’s so important to take the time, as it increases the chances that the right people will click on your link!

  • http://twitter.com/resonancesocial Resonance

    So true Jon — amazing how much time and energy is put into the almighty ranking and how little into what actually shows up on the SERP!

  • http://www.jontusmedia.com/ Jon Buscall

    Thanks! Admittedly I have to go back and redo them from time to time, but I find that WordPress is ideal for this.

  • http://www.jontusmedia.com/ Jon Buscall

    :=) I often find myself going back to the meta description if I see a post in Google show up that doesn’t work.

    I know it’s yet another thing to keep an eye on but I’ve found that taking the time to sort meta descriptions benefits my blog and ultimately business.