In yesterday's Nugget, we explained some basic strategies of meta description writing for the different types of pages in your website.
Today we're looking at a specific way to write your meta descriptions.
It is important to remember that only 150 characters of your description will appear in the SERP. This is a standard across all search engines. The search engines do not use the meta description for SEO ranking, and no one other than us tech-heads will ever view the source code of your website, so it's a waste of your time to write more than 150 characters.
Be wary of any SEO professional that wants to create long descriptions. Find the most concise way to say what you need to about a page.
Let's say you want to write a description for your page showing a collection of custom made wedding and engagement rings. First look at the overall content on that page. Do you have both photos and written content? Before trying to write a description, take a look at your page's opening sentence. A good content writer should have written a good descriptive first sentence. If so, then go ahead and use that sentence.
If you have little content on the page and a handful of engagement ring photos then you need to write what you could refer to as an "elevator pitch" for your page. Your words need to jump out at the reader over all other results on the SERP and yell "PICK ME, PICK ME!" Let's write a real example...
Let's help out one of our daily readers that recently commented on our Nuggets. Take a look at this website: http://globalpathwaysjewelry.com/?page_id=49
Reading over that page you will see about 280 words of text in the main body area. Scraping through it, we're going to suggest this as a description:
"Should your engagement ring have a traditional diamond? We love helping you bring your creative engagement ring ideas to life. View our examples."
That's 145 characters. It's our first try, and we will stress FIRST TRY. You will need look at your Google Analytics account after a month to see if you have more "entrance" clicks on that page. If not then you need to rewrite it and try again. Remember to keep watching what your competitors are doing because they are also watching you. When you make a change they will also make a change.
When you finally get the right description to attract visitors you will also find that your bounce rate for that page will go down. Look in your Google Analytics for your entrance pages where it will also show the bounce rate for each page.
Lower bounce rates mean happier customers and Google will notice your happy customers. Happy customers for you also means more satisfies users of Google Search. Although the meta descriptions do not directly influence SEO through keywords, it's the lower bounce rate that will give you higher ranking.
We know the topic of meta descriptions usually sends people off grumbling at us. If you have trouble with this, please give yourself a few minutes and then look at it again. If you need more details just let us know.
In fact, feel free to send us back one of your own pages and we'll give some direct feedback. Speaking of feedback, feel free to send your own website questions to us and perhaps we'll make a regular habit of using real examples.
