Meta Descriptions
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Meta descriptions also don’t help your rankings, but they do help click-through-rates (CTR). The meta description on your web pages is what usually shows as the snippet in the SERPs, so it’s important to write descriptions that make people want to click through to your website.
Let me say that one more time: Write for CTR.
Meta Keywords
In the early days of SEO, stuffing your keywords into the meta keywords tag was a surefire way to ranked quickly. Nowadays, meta keywords don’t help your rankings like they used to.
Also, your competitors can use the meta keyword tag on your website to snipe your profitable keywords, so I recommend just ignoring them.
Use the meta description to differentiate yourself from competitors and make a compelling case why searchers should click your link instead of your competitor’s. Compelling titles and descriptions could get the #2 result clicked on more than #1, so use this to your advantage.
Keep Control
Sometimes, Google and Yahoo! will pull descriptions for your websites from DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) or the Yahoo! Directory, assuming your site is listed there. If you don’t like want the search engines to override your handwritten descriptions with the ones provided by the directory, you can just use a meta tag in the <head> of your document to force your own description to show.
To suppress the DMOZ description, use:
<meta name="robots" content="noodp">
To suppress the Yahoo! Directory description, use:
<meta name="robots" content="noydir">
Or, combine them as:
<meta name="robots" content="noydir,noodp">
(For more information on how to use these tags, see here and here).
Write Your Descriptions
Here are a few more tips for crafting effective meta descriptions:
- Like titles, search engines will truncate after a certain character limit. One or two sentences is usually fine, somewhere in the 160-180 character range.
- Make original descriptions for each page that clearly indicate what the page is about and why the person going there should care.
- If you don’t include a meta description, most search engines will self-select text from your page and display that as your description in the SERPs. If your page is structured correctly and your opening content on every page is spectacular, then this could be an easy method for automating your descriptions. Since this isn’t the case 99% of the time, I don’t suggest you do this. You’re probably better off taking the time to write a custom description.
- If you have a data-driven site (e.g. shopping cart) with tens or hundreds of thousands of pages, use your data to help create the descriptions (this also works well with titles, headings and other page elements). They can follow the same pattern but remain unique by using a combination of shared text and page-specific variables.
- Use your targeted keyword phrases near the beginning of the descriptions to confirm to readers that they’re getting the most relevant result.
A Word on Automation
Many of the above-mentioned elements can be automated by your CMS. If you have a site with a lot of regularly published content like a blog or e-commerce site, automation is essential. Some CMSs do it fairly well, some are horrible.
