Web Content | SEO Writing

Are You Paying Enough Attention To Your Meta Descriptions?

How well are your meta descriptions doing in terms of helping you attract organic clicks? The meta description is a key element of successful web based copywriting and online article writing. Writing the meta description is something many people fail at with their web copy and their articles.The meta description can make or break you on the search engine results page. You want Google to love it and you want it to be irresistible to your human target audience as well. Over the years there has been much debate about how relevant to SEO your meta description is but one thing hasn’t changed… this is your opportunity to grab someone’s attention and make them want to click.

What is the meta description?

The meta description or summary is the two sentences that show up in the search engine when your page gets indexed. This is what people see in Google, Yahoo or MSN that they scroll through. When they Google something, unless they click “I’m feeling lucky”, they’re presented with ten results. Those first ten to twenty results are where you want to be listed.

If you manage to get there, what you now want is a killer meta description that will coax the searchers to your website. If your description or summary doesn’t tell them that you have the information that they want, you might as well be on page ten. If you hit result #3 and your meta is more compelling than the listings at the first and second spot, guess which link is going to get clicked… yours!

What makes a great meta tag?

A great meta tag tells people in twenty or so words why they should click on your link. It should tell them what they will find. If that tag or description convinces them that they will find the information they want by clicking your link, they will click it.

When I write meta descriptions, I write as many keywords in as possible and I make sure it makes sense and makes people want to click. When I have a client striving for top spot on Google, I often search their keywords and look at their competition on page one. I look at what might have helped them get to page one with primary keywords and Long Tail keywords and I also look for human readability so that people and search engines will like them. My quest is to write a better description than the top ten results! That way, even if my client makes it to spot #10, they have a good chance of being clicked on.

One of my SEO article writing secrets:

When I write for clients that don’t ask me to write meta descriptions for them and even otherwise, I try to treat my first two sentences of each article as the meta description! That way, if their publishing platform doesn’t have them craft a manual meta, chances are that they’ll get a rich snippet from the first content paragraph.

Need help with your SEO content? Contact me! danaprincewriting at gmail dot com.