« CSS and Google — 301 Redirect Those Old URL’s » 18 May 2007

Following in suit with all the SEO title posts I’ve been providing lately, I will discuss the description today. Though the meta tags has a whole have decreased in value, the description is still important from a marketing standpoint (MSN does seem to give a little weight to the description, so optimization of such is necessary, but don’t stress too much over that part). Most often, the description tag will appear just below the clickable link (which is usually the title tag) in the SERP’s.

This is important to remember for a couple of reasons. The description is your first “sales pitch” to a potential customer. It should be concise, and call the searcher to action. Also, the words searched for will be in bold, bringing more attention to the description. See below for an example on how our description for the meta tag optimization page shows in Google:

So you can see how it would be important to showcase your target search terms in the description, and make it clickworthy.

The description does have a max length. It seems that Google is being the shortest, at about 150 — 160 characters. It’s not always the same number, but you should be aware of this as too long of a description can result in a mixed message to a searcher.

So for those descriptions, keep them short, sweet, and enticing.

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