It is crucial to search engine rankings that a carefully crafted Description, preferably unique to every page, be provided. This helps the search engines to properly categorise the site.
A well crafted description will also be used verbatim in most search engine results displayed to searchers, meaning you can actually control what is shown. There are two common problems with Description tags;
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You do not have one at all. Therefore, you effectively force the search engines to “create” one from random snippets of text from anywhere on the page, which can look very unappealing to a searcher who sees this in the SE results!
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You have a “generic” one that is used on every page of the site! This (marginally) better than not having one at all, but means you miss the vital opportunity to control what is displayed about the site, and emphasise to the SE’s what each page is about.
What you require is a crisp summary of the page contents in the first 150 characters – which is all that Google displays. However, it does not do any harm to make the Description extend up to 200 characters as some SE’s will display this much. At the same time as you create this “summary” you must;
- Place the primary keyword phrase as close to the beginning as possible
- Make a compelling sales pitch that persuades the viewer that THIS page has what he/she wants
- Repeat the primary keyword/s between 1.5 to 2 times, and/or add 1 or more closely related word/s
- Not over-capitalise it, and avoid punctuation, grammatical and spelling errors!
:: Author’s Note ::
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Ben Kemp has 20 years of experience in the IT industry, including 12 years as a free-lance IT consultant. He is one of NZ’s longest serving Search Engine Optimisation practitioners, with clients throughout Australasia. He shares his experiences via The SEO Guys Blog.
The SEO Guy (NZ) :: Email: bjk@TheSeoGuy.co.nz :: Web: http://www.comauth.co.nz
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