Shopping!!!
Who doesn’t love shopping!?
Imagine yourself in a busy shopping street. How do you decide which shop you should buy from?
In retrospect, you realize you make the decision sub-consciously by just looking at the clothes on display. The shop whose mannequins have worn eye-catching clothes, that’s where you are headed.
Find the prime spot of the street, pay rents for large spaces which cost an arm and a leg, hand-pick designer couture and top quality clothing. All this goes to no avail if you finally, disregard the clothes you choose to display in the display window or visual merchandising.
Quoting Linkin Park, “in the end, it doesn’t even matter!”
You have lost the interest of your potential customer and they are your rivals’ now!
If we are on the same page by now, my intent of selling the idea of a Meta Description will be an absolute breeze.
Oh, wait! Let me first tell you what a Meta Description is.
A Meta Description is a snippet of 155-160 characters which appear in the search engine results page [SERP] diligently crafted to convey the essence of the website, or a blog.
Meta Description is also called as Meta Tag as the description is placed at the websites’ header segment as an HTML tag instead of being on the page as shown below,
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”snippet of the website”>
</head>
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression”- Will Rogers
This quote sums up how imperative a meta description is. It can make or break a website!
There is no point in fighting tooth and nail to get to the top of SERP and not giving the audience a reason enough to check you out.
Doesn’t everything I rambled about shopping earlier make sense to you now??
An unappealing meta description directly affects the click-through rate [CTR]. CTR directly affects the search engine optimization [SEO] factors. Thus, a lousy meta description can indirectly make a website drop down in the SERP [Search Engine Results Page].
Did you know that most of the social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter use meta descriptions of the website as the description of the post when the website is shared on their sites?
You could choose between capitalizing on these sites by penning down an enticing meta description and letting the sites pick haphazard text which could hamper the user experience.
Now that you’ve learnt how paramount meta descriptions are, let me describe how to craft a great meta description.
02
Have the right length.
160 characters and not 1 more. Characters following the 160th get chopped off, leaving your audience bewildered. Not so nice, is it?
03
Genuinely summerise the content of the website, a blog or a webpage.
A fake meta description can annoy your user making him leave the website. This will adversely affect the bounce rate and in turn SEO ranking. Let me give you a heads-up that Google will not display the meta description of websites which do not match its content.
Brownie points if you manage to include the keywords in your meta description.
The keywords get bolded in the SERP which will catch your audiences’ eye. That does not imply that you fill it with keywords. Such meta descriptions will come off spammy which is just not what we want. It should be written for humans and not search engines.
05
Use your words wisely.
A meta description can be anything but ordinary and should have visit-my-website written all over it. An emotionally appealing meta description can drive traffic like there is no tomorrow.
06
Contain call to action [CTA].
Phrases, like find out more, learn more, try for free, download now, will persuade the user to give your website a chance.
07
Don’t you mess with Google by copying somebody else’s meta description.
Google will replace it with random text from your website to make it look unique and to offer what it is best-known for, unmatched user experience.
08
Richen your meta description.
You could lure your audience by including special offers, product specifications, customer ratings, calling out popular brands, showcasing yourself and more.
09
Don’t use double quotation marks.
Google cuts off that meta description at double quotes. You could play safe by steering clear of all non-alphanumeric characters. In case the double quotes are unavoidable, you could use the HTML entity.
10
It is sometimes okay to skip meta descriptions.
Yes, you read it right. If your website is a search result for more than 3 keywords, your best bet is to let the search engines naturally populate its meta description as they display the keywords and its surrounding phrases without detracting the relevance.
When all’s said and done, you can be certain that a conscientiously written meta description is an instrument you could use to rule the marketing world by transforming your website into a clickbait.
