I know most of you would probably find this hilarious, but I happened upon a flea market during one of my sojourns. Being the inquisitive cat that I am, I sifted through some of the goodies being sold there and found some curiosities there that had me chuckling while reading what was written on the packaging.
You would not believe some of the things I read there, or if you have been to one of these flea markets, you probably might.
There’s this cream that supposedly removes calluses (if I interpreted the bad English correctly) that had, as a tagline, the phrase “good product, removes horniness of foot” written on it.
I almost laughed out loud right there as I was reading it.
There was much, much more silliness there, but I think you all get my point here. How a bad description could turn a (possibly) good product into something that’s worth more than a laugh and a half.
I won’t even begin to tell you how ludicrous or even salacious the other descriptions I read were, but believe me when I say most of them were quite suggestive, and I’m not sure if that was intended or just entirely by coincidence.
Anyway, I mentioned this because I have also come across some pretty ludicrous descriptions of some sites on the interwebs. For those in the know, this description is called the meta description. It’s that small chunk of information immediately seen when you read about a site on search results just below the title.
Now let us ponder on this for a while, shall we?
If you had one chance to make yourself known, that chance to make people know who you are, for whatever purpose, whether to sell something, or just achieve an amount of renown, would you really want that very, very short description of you to be written so badly?
“Hey, this is the Andy Jenkins blog, you read it to remove horniness…”
No, I didn’t think so.
Now, don’t you think spending a little more time and putting in a bit more effort into making the title tags of your site more informative and as efficiently descriptive as possible, so that people would better know what your site is all about?
I would, and so should you.
I won’t go into a very long read this time around because I want this post to reflect what I’m trying to point out here:
Be absolutely descriptive
You are allowed just a few characters on your meta description, so make every one count! Put in words you want the search engine spiders to associate with your site, so that when users do punch in keywords in search engines, your keyword-rich description lights up in bolds. Make no mistake, you are not allowed to write a paragraph for a description here, just barely a sentence or two, so fit in what needs to be there, and try to make it sound as naturally readable as possible.
Pick the most important keywords ONLY
What people who don’t know much about good SEO do is they cram their meta descriptions full of keywords with no regard for readability on the part of human traffic. This is a shame, really, because if you haven’t heard, Google doesn’t even consider the meta description as an on-page ranking factor anymore.
That means that whatever you write in your meta description field – or even if you write nothing at all – your web page’s rankings will not be affected. These days, the meta description is there to act as a snippet of the content that a person can find if he chooses to visit a page. You might as well write it as descriptively as possible for human readers because search engine bots just don’t care about it anymore.
So do you dump the use of keywords altogether? Not really. If a page is strongly relevant to a keyword you’re optimizing for, it’s bound to come naturally when you describe the page. Using keywords also gets your page noticed by searchers as eye tracking studies have shown that search results with keywords in more empathic text gets clicked more often than regularly formatted ones.
Keep it short, silly
Meta descriptions can be as long as 160 characters (including spaces), so whatever message you want to deliver to convince searchers that your page is worth reading, you have to say it in a brief but powerful statement. Get to the main point right away and leave a sense of promise on the part of a reader that something of value awaits them. Eliminate unnecessary words, avoid using adjectives unless completely necessary and try not to use big, long words that readers will need a dictionary to decipher. Follow these tips and you’ll see considerably shorter descriptions become easier to compose.
And while we’re on the subject of briefness, I’ll take the initiative and finish this bite-sized post. What I just wrote about is a pretty simple lesson, that’s easy to learn but will take a little time to master. Just remember to always consider the convenience of your visitors and you’ll never stray from the right path.
And yes, I do believe you can do this.
Enjoy.
Andy “no-more-flea-markets-for-me” Jenkins
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