Meta Descriptions and Relevance in SEO
November 6, 2012
You might be shocked, but not everything a SEO consultant practices will relate entirely to search engines. The importance of meta tags have a lot more to do with the end user rather than the search engines themselves. Meta descriptions are one great example of why small business owners and SEO’s must continually think about the user when doing SEO. Think of a meta description as a free advertising method that is compelling to a potential customer.
Search engines typically use meta descriptions as “snippets” on a results page, but they aren’t always obligated to do so. There are many reasons why Google might not use a defined meta description on the results page:
1. The webpage does not have a defined meta description. This is an easy fix for Google. They will most likely search your webpage’s content for text that relates to the search query.
2. The webpage has a meta description, but it doesn’t contain any of the terms in the search query. Google’s job is to give searchers the most relevant content. Period. If some search terms do not meet the descriptions content, then Google may sub out the defined description for relevant content on the page. They do this by pulling small chunks from around the webpage and feeding it into the description. When looking for this content, they consider headings, navigation, body copy, and most importantly, query text.
3. There is more relevant content surrounding your company on other websites, such as online directories. Historically, Google has used descriptive data, such as content in the first paragraph of a related page or on a directory’s description of the site. Unfortunately, you can’t tell engines what text they must use for the description of a site, but you can tell them what they can’t use. For example, you can tell Google that they cannot use descriptive text on Yahoo’s Directory by inserting the following code into the <head> section of your homepage.
<meta name=”robots” content=”noydir/”
You can use this meta tag on your entire site; it is most effective on the home page because these directories don’t have content that would relate to deeper parts of your website.
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