What is a meta description?
Continuing with our blog series on meta tags, this post looks at the meta description. The meta description tag plays an important part in optimising your site (SEO) and a crucial role in gaining click throughs from the search results.
The meta description tag is a piece of hidden HTML coding (known as a tag) that allows some search engines to display a description of your site in search results.
You will normally find the meta description within the < head > tags, just below the title tag. The code will look like this:
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”The description of your web page will go here”>
Your meta description will most often be shown in the search results:
Google will normally show the meta description if it feels it is relevant to the searchers query (which if your page is relevant to the search query and is being shown in the search results, hopefully your meta description is an accurate account of what can be found on that page, so Google will most likely always show your meta description). If you don’t have a meta description, Google will extract a piece of text from your page and display that.
The meta description can play an important part in getting searchers to click on your page within the results. Just because you’re on the first page of search results, it doesn’t guarantee you any clicks. You have to compel people to click on your page and not the other 9 (or other 10 or so paid listings). This is where the meta description comes in handy. You should try and craft a description with a strong call to action. Linking the content to the title tag content is also a good way to reinforce your message. Have these two tags working together to persuade people to click. If you can get some keywords in here, that’s great. You’ll notice in the search engine results that the terms you’ve searched will be highlighted in bold in the search results. So if you have some keywords in your meta description (and title tag), then these will be made bold if they match the search query.
It’s a good idea to try and keep the meta description to within 150 characters. Different search engines display different amount of text in their results, but if you keep it to within 150, then you’ll generally be covered in all.
If you need any help crafting some effective meta tags, please get in touch with a member of the SMEketing team.
April 27, 2010
What are title tags?
One of the most basic, but important things you can do for your website (in terms of search engine optimisation – SEO), is to ensure that each and every page has its own unique, keyword rich title tag .
The title tag can be found at the top of your source code within the < title > and < /title > tags (on a web page, click on View > Source Code to view the page code).
Where will I see my title tag?
The page title will be shown within your site in the web browser here:
It is also shown within the search results here:
Because the title tag is shown in the search result pages, creating a well crafted title could also lead to an increased click through rate.
What should I include in my title tag?
We’d recommend a mixture of your company name and keywords. If you’re targeting a specific geographical area, include this as well. It’s important to remember that search engines only display a certain number of characters within your title. It varies between search engines, but if you aim to keep your title under 70 characters you’ll be fine.
For example, if you were an accounting firm in Fareham in Hampshire called Bill & Ben, you would may want to include your company name, your target area of Hampshire, as well as some keywords (which you would have hopefully researched already!). If you’re aware that the term ‘book-keeping’ and ‘tax returns’ are two of your major keywords, you could craft a title that looks like:
Bill & Ben Tax Accountants Hampshire
or you could have
Bill & Ben Book-Keeping Accountants Hampshire
However, you could try and fit it all in:
Bill & Ben Accountants – Tax Returns & Book-Keeping Hampshire
or
Tax Returns & Book-Keeping Hampshire > Bill & Ben Accounting Fareham
You can seperate or split the title using various characters. The common ones are: – > and |. There’s no “correct” one to use. Sometimes a ‘|’ might be better to split up different subjects such as ‘Tax Accountants | Book-Keeping’. Whereas a ‘>’ can be better when the next section follows on from the first, i.e. ‘Hampshire Accountants > Bill & Ben’.
You can use proper sentences if you like ‘Bill & Ben are Hampshire based accountants’ would also work well.
Try not to get into the trap of spending hours fiddling and obsessing over your title tags. Just make sure they make sense, conveys the content on the page well, and include your desired keywords.
If you’re ranking well for a particular search term, but you’re not getting a lot of clicks, it could be that your title tag isn’t compelling enough. Sometimes it can take a bit of testing and tweaking to get it right.
Our next post will be focusing on another important website tag – the meta description!
Until then, cheerio. If you have any questions or comments regarding your title tags, or if you’ve seen a vast improvement in your rankings because of changes you made to your title tags – let us know in the comments below, or email us on info@SMEketing.com.
April 8, 2010
