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How to use Meta Description effectively for your SEO efforts?

Posted on: 06-8-2011 Posted in: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Web Design, Web Developing

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about improving the ranking of your webpage on search engines’ results page (SERPs), to generate traffic to your websites. One way of improving traffic to your site is through meta description tagging.

So, what exactly is meta description?

Meta descriptions main purpose is to show and describe the content of the page to potential visitors – both robots and human beings. It is very essential in helping the search engine (such as Google, Yahoo and Bing) to understand the content of the page in order to match the relevancy of the search as well as give users an idea of what your page is about.

As a result, meta descriptions is one of the key elements that not only help search engines ‘read’ your website better, but can help you gain a higher click-through rate from the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

To get you started, here are some tips to help you increase the number of visitors to your page through effective meta description tagging:

  • Using a maximum of 155 characters. Any character beyond this limit would be truncated, which may cause important information to be omitted.
  • Include primary keywords in the description, where possible.
  • Avoid repetitive keywords in description. It results in a description that does not make grammatical sense, making it un-natural, and difficult to read.
  • Tease to please. Having teasers in your description would entice people to click on your link. Include action verbs like ‘read’, ‘learn’, ‘discover’, ‘find’ to encourage people to click on your link to read more.
  • Use the name of your page in description. This allows higher relevancy in your page description in searches.
  • Use quality and relevant descriptions. Having descriptions that give a concise representation of your page content gives searchers a clear idea of what the page contains. This allows them to judge whether the page would be relevant to what they are searching for.
  • Use unique descriptions for different pages.
  • Do away with symbols. They are not helpful, and simply a waste of space.

    • About the Author

    iClick Media
    iClick Media is an Internet Marketing company specialising in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Web Design & Web Analytics. We are the preferred choice of many organisations in varying industries for our Internet Marketing strategies and solutions.