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So the question is, what are some tips for optimizing website descriptions
displayed in Google search results? How much do I incorporate meta keywords
into the description? So, historically Google has actually left a lot of
control to webmasters about what exactly appears in your description in
their search engine results. This is really cool. Your ability to show a
user what your page is about, even provide like some description about what
the page is and then it displays your URL typically, under that. So, what
are some things that you want to consider here? First of all, for ranking
purposes, historically it's been really good to make sure that the keywords
for which you want to rank appear in this page title. Why is that? Why
does Google maybe still care about that?
Well if I only give every single webmaster seventy characters to actually,
you know, tell us what your page is really about; the actual words that you
use in there are probably really important, so they still kind of say
alright if that's the title of your page and it matches the user's query,
that's something that we may want to look at. This black text underneath
that, historically has been your meta description. That's the place where
you get to tell a search engine user "hey, this is why you might want to
click on this page". Google doesn't necessarily use a lot of that data, or
any of it really, for ranking purposes. But it's a great opportunity for
you to try to get somebody to click on your page instead of a competitor's
down here or maybe even above. So I kept using the word historically.
Google is kind of pulling away your ability to kind of do that now. What
they've found is that when they write the descriptions of a page, sometimes
that they can get users to click into those pages even better than you can
when you try to write it. Some of the reasons for that may be you're trying
to fill the space up with too many like selling propositions like free
shipping, free shipping, free shipping like over and over. Google is
saying "all right you know that's fine, but that doesn't really describe
your page. So we're going to do that for you". Even page titles to some
extent, are manipulated by the search engine to try to get to a user's
query. So, if you type in your brand name or something like that, you'll
see that happen a lot. Or they'll take the page title and instead of
actually showing what you wrote for your title, they'll insert like here's
a brand name's page for contact us or something like that. So, getting back
to the question of how do I actually optimize this. Well it's a good thing
to actually put some reasons why a user might want to click into your site,
as well as what they can expect.
So, if I'm a search engine user, I come to this, I kind of am looking at a
bunch of things, I want to be really reassured that what I'm clicking is
something that I'm expecting to get. So, the closer in line your page
title and your description is for what actually lies beyond, really
important to keep the user on the page so that they don't bounce. Another
thing that isn't a bad idea to do is if you have something that really
differentiates your product or your page from a competitors in the search,
call that out a little bit. So maybe mentioning free shipping once isn't a
terrible idea or mentioning that, you know, you have the most light weights
or the strongest widgets or something like that; is a good idea too. So,
just be thinking about the user. How can I get them to visit my page
instead of a competitor's? Make sure that really important keywords are in
your title, and you should be good to go.