The Importance of Meta Descriptions for SEO

When a search engine displays results it usually includes a short description of the websites or web pages displayed. This description is what you see on the search engine results page under the title. A meta description plays a similar role in on page SEO. Because meta descriptions are what users see before they click on a link, they should speak to the user and offer an enticing reason to visit your site.

A great way to get prospective website users to stay on your site and interact with your webpages is to highlight keywords in your meta description. Make it appealing and relevant to their search, and ensure that it closely relates to the content of the page.

Ensuring Your Page Descriptions Are In Place

Make sure that all of your web pages have meta descriptions. This is due to the text being indexed by the search engines. For instance, if your page is about SEO and the meta description is, “SEO is all about getting the right keyword density”, then it would be important to include the keyword “SEO” in your web pages meta description.

Another important aspect that the search engines index, is the text that links to other pages. Make sure that those links are included in your meta description. With SEO, the fewer incoming links that your page has, the better. It is also important that the referring sites have the same keywords that you have used.

Keywords

Include some text on the page that is full of keywords. This can be your sales text, your provider’s information or your Why We’re No 1 listing. It’s important to realise that search engine spiders are not able to recognize the images on your webpages. For this reason, it is best to put keywords in the picture’s ALT attribute. Use descriptive captions with the images, rather than “click here to see the picture”. And if you are using your business name as an image, try to reflect the keywords in the image name.

Included in the standard header tags are the title tags and the other meta tags. These tags are not viewable by the website visitors, but the information in the tag display tells the search engine spiders what the web page is about. Meta tags should be included in all of your web pages; if they are not there, then you need to identify missing tags and re-title the page. When you re-title a page after an update, the search engines will re-read the HTML and note the new title in the HTML.

These are just a few fundamental tips on how to use meta tags to optimise your web pages. The majority of the basic SEO tips can be discovered by performing a simple Google search, and finding a list of websites that do not use meta tags or have an open public policy on their SEO practices.