How do you get searchers to click on your site rather than those from your competitors…?
Simple! Improve your snippets with a meta description makeover.
Raj Krishnan, part of Google’s Webmaster Central, writes, “The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.”
This is an example of the HTML output needed for a snippet:
<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”informative description here”>
Google often prefers “to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics,” he states.
Raj makes the following recommendations to improve descriptions:
- Differentiate the descriptions for different pages
- Include clearly tagged facts in the description
- Programmatically generate human-readable diverse descriptions for larger sites
- Use quality descriptions
Examples and full details are provided in the complete article by Raj, found at Google’s Webmaster Central.
Even though I agree that clicks and (targetted) traffic are key, especially for monetised sites, don’t underestimate the value of brand recognition. To be listed repeatedly for similar phrases can lead to a sense of trust and familiarity which cannot be achieved otherwise. Sometimes just being there in the results is ill you need.