Should you Optimise Description Tags for Search Engines or for your Customers?
by Monsoon
After you are aware with Title Tag optimisation tips, the next thing to consider is to optimise the description meta. But before we further dive into more details about optimising the description meta tag, we should know, for whom do we optimise our description meta tags? Is it for search engine or it is for customers. The fact is we optimise description tags for improving search engine visibility and also to improve customer’s online experience.
Optimise Tips for your <Description Meta Tags>-
- Know the purpose of Description- It’s a known fact that description meta tags plays a very important role in your search engine visibility. Optimise your description tag to such an extent that it doesn’t only improve your search engine visibility but triggers interest in people to click to your site.For e.g. if you are a retail business and selling Tempur Mattress, a description like this would not only improve site visibility but trigger more interest<meta name=”description” content=”We offer wide range of Tempur Products, Tempur mattress, tempur beds, Tempur pillows at guaranteed cheaper price. FREE 2 man Delivery. Possible 0% VAT EXEMPTION.”/>
as the description had the queried keywords and has the potential to trigger interest because of the (Free Delivery and the possibility of 0% vat exemption.)
- Know your competitors- It’s a good practice to know your competitors and how they have optimised their description. Identify what they are missing and try to apply them in your website. Optimise not only for search engines but also for your customers.For e.g.<meta name=”description” content=”Most TEMPUR mattresses dispatched in 24 hours. Free 2 man delivery to bedroom. Possible 0% Vat exemption. Family business, established 50 years.”>
Would definitely have better CTR than a description
<meta name=”description” content=”Good quality beds and mattresses at Shopname”>
Both of them might appear in the first page of search engine but the first one has the potential to trigger more interest in people.
- Tweet Your Description Tag- Search engines like Google loves fresh updated content. It’s a good practice to tweet your description at times to improve your visibility.
- Enrich Your Content- Search Engines don’t always display the description meta tags as a result in the Search engine result pages (SERP). It at times take part of your content from within your website to match a user’s query. A good enriched content not only improve your search engine visibility but helps you to rank better.
- Target right Keywords-Target the keywords for which you want to rank. Prioritise your keyword and evenly spread the keywords in the description to improve your search engine visibility.
- Description Tag should be relevant to Your Content- The description meta tag should be relevant to the content of the page and the title of that page. If a user lands to your website with a particular keyword, the content and the URL of the page should be relevant to your description and should have the potential to convert a click into a conversion. Any inconsistency of the description to the content or URL would result into a high bounce back ratio.
- Uniqueness Should Be Maintained-Description tags should be unique in all the pages.For e.g. if you have one page about a Digital Agency Manchester and the other page about Web Design Manchester, even though they have resemblance use different description meta tags. It helps you to identify the value of the description meta tags in terms of popularity and ranking in search engines.
- Please Avoid Keyword Stuffing- Now a day’s keyword meta tag have less importance in terms of search engine visibility of your website. I often find that many online businesses stuff their description meta tags with the content of keywords meta tags. Does that really helps? No, as in such scenarios, search engines uses content from within your website as your description meta tag.
- Length of the Description Meta Tag- Most of the search engines display 160 characters in the description tag. If you have a more lengthier description, Google will trim out and will only display those sections that matches the keywords present in the search query and by means of this you might lose out the relevancy in the description because search engines will end up displaying merged results highlighting the keywords.
- Don’t make the mistake- Well often I have seen many businesses consider the home page as the only page to be search engine optimised and leave the other pages unattended. It’s a big mistake. For small to big online businesses, it is important to optimise the description meta tags for all the pages. With the extended features of site links appearing on the Google search engine result pages, it’s a good practice to optimise the description meta tags as Google displays the first 30 -35 characters of the description tags in the extended site link architecture description.For e.g
The first 30-35 characters should be compelling enough to trigger an interest in the user to click on it and should be unique.
As a Digital Agency Manchester, we pride ourselves in delivering our customers the best upto date practices in SEO to improve their search engine visibility and improve their CTR.
