Professional Global SEO – SEM | janet bartoli

The Description Meta Tag Converts Visitors

February 26, 2008

SEO does include a good keyword rich and page relevant description meta tag of no more than 200 characters with spaces. That’s the technical general description of a description meta tag. Well, as you may know the search engines aren’t looking at your description meta tag to determine your ranking or site’s relevancy. From what we have learned it’s not being looked at when figuring the many types of algorithms.

The description tag has been largely ignored and the same non-unique description used over and over on every page. If there is no meta description at all, the search engines will retrieve the first few lines of text from your page – providing you actually have text on your page at all. Another way for search engines to acquire a description from your site would be to scrape your description that you may not have put a whole lot of SEO thought in from your DMOZ or Yahoo directory listing. Nice? No, not at all.

Your description meta tag is used solely for conversion purposes. Once you get excellent search rankings, “oh look I rank 2nd in Google for “seo consulting”, but are you converting those viewers of your 2nd place ranking? I recently gave an SEO seminar to a very large publisher client of mine. This seminar was for their technical and editorial teams. I asked the large group of 20 or so people in the class, how many of you read the descriptions in your natural search? An overwhelming 17 out of 20 people said Yes they do read the descriptions. It really does help convert – gets them in the door to your site – that’s your objective isn’t it?

It’s difficult for me to ask myself these questions, I do read descriptions – they do help me find the page I need, but I am not the typical passive searcher. This is what I do for a living. It’s always helpful to ask the average web surfer of all ages and backgrounds how do you search? What search engine do you always use? If your researching electronics how do you go about that search?  User behaviors are very important to understand search and how to effectively optimize for it.

Optimize your description meta tags for that specific landing page and you will get your best targeted traffic and should see good conversions.

Filed under: SEO Factors