The description meta tag. Ever give it much thought?
It’s important – but not for the reasons you might think.
The meta description tag is placed in the “head” section of the html of your website, and looks something like this:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="informative description here">
You can’t see this description when you look at your web page on your monitor: it’s “hidden” in the code your website is built on. So if users can’t see it on your site, what is this description for?
It’s not to send information about your site to the search engines, contrary to popular belief.
Google, for one (and remember that in terms of global web search, Google dominates the search market, with around 70% of search queries), pays no attention to it at all in terms of judging what your site is about for search engine ranking purposes. Nor does it pay any attention to the “keywords” meta tag.
The meta description is used to create a “snippet”, or a short text preview of your site displayed in the search engine results page (SERP). When a user searches for a phrase using the search engine, the listings page (SERP) shows a list of titles and snippets, that look something like this:
The relevance and effectiveness of this snippet has a direct influence on your “clickthrough rate”. And the meta description tag is your opportunity to control what is displayed. You have around 160 characters or less to prequalify searchers and get them excited about what you can do for them. I say prequalify, because with the description you can also filter out free online translation seekers. You don’t want just any traffic: you want traffic that is actively seeking your translation services and is ready to pay for them.
So what happens if you don’t use a meta description tag?
If you don’t specifically tell the search engines what to display in your snippet using the description meta tag, the search engines will try to cobble together a description of their own, taken from the content on that page. This means your snippet is no longer in your control, and the results can often be less than satisfactory, as you can see in this example:
In this case, the search engine has cobbled together words that match the query from the page, but the snippet makes little sense, doesn’t tell the searcher really what they can expect to find on the page and certainly doesn’t entice the search to click that listing over another with a better quality snippet, like this one by Guru.com:
For that snippet, the description meta tag, which clearly describes what searchers can expect to find and includes a clear call-to-action, provides much greater control over what is shown to the searcher on the Google results page and is much more effective, with a higher click-through rate, than a mish-mash of keywords and phrases extracted from the page by an automated system.
But I have a meta description tag and Google won’t display it in my snippet!
If you have set a meta description tag in your page’s html but Google is not showing it as a snippet in the SERP, the reason is usually one of the following:
- your description is not relevant to the search query
- the description is stuffed full of keywords and is therefore not relevant to the search query
- you have used the same description for every page on your site
1. Your description is not relevant to the search query
When someone searches, and Google has decided your site is relevant for the search and includes it in the listing, it then scans your description meta tag to build the snippet. If it decides the description isn’t relevant enough for the query, it will reject your snippet and create its own description by pulling text from your content.
2. The description is stuffed full of keywords
Remember that the description will not affect your search rankings, so don’t waste time filling it with long strings of keywords. Not only it is pointless, but descriptions like these are far less likely to be used as snippets as they degrade user experience.
3. You have used the same description for every page on your site
This is a common error. Google doesn’t like it when you give an identical description (and title, but more on that in another post) to every page. So instead of using the description “Jane Doe, freelance Klingon to English translator specialising in Klingon history and architecture” as your description for each page, use a different description relevant to the content for each page on your site. Doing so will mean a much greater chance of Google using your snippet.
And remember, while the description meta tag won’t increase your search engine ranking, it will help encourage qualified potential clients to click your listing instead of someone else’s.
Simple rules for effective descriptions/snippets
- Don’t use the same tag on each page: make each tag different and relevant to the content
- Remember you are writing the description for a human searcher, not the search engine
- Describe the page content, save your USP or generic business description for the home page