How Important Are Meta Descriptions When It Comes To A Website?
Whenever you enter a few keywords in to a search engine’s search function you’ll find that you get a set of results, all revolving around the search that you entered. If you search for the word ‘egg’, it will probably bring back a specific set of results from websites that contain information about eggs. But how can you be sure that the website that you’re about to click is the one that you want to visit?
Well that’s where the meta description comes in. The description itself can be seen directly below the main listing of the website, directly under the URL of the page itself. This description is the short paragraph which acts as a brief preview of the text that’s present on the page that you’re about to click. This meta description can literally say anything, whether it’s about the website itself or even about the specific search term that you recently entered.
Most website developing tools will allow you to manually enter a meta description for your website and even more of these tools will let you add specific descriptions for certain pages on your website too. So if you’re interested in providing potential visitors with a specific collection of information about an individual page on your website then it’s a good idea to write a little something about that page so that when it’s searched for online the paragraph will display prominently.
In order to ensure that your website is listed correctly, you’ll want to link your meta description with your meta tags. This means that if your website is about glass fish tanks you’ll want to make sure that your meta tags are set to Glass | Fish | Tanks and then that your meta description also contains those same words. What this will do is provide a firm base of understanding for search engines whilst your website is being indexed.
Your meta description itself will be comprised of a few lines of text and this text will be used by people viewing your URL, before they click it. Sometimes the name is enough and people are happy to click the title text and visit a website. Other times people might want to know a little bit about what your website does or offers so a good meta description can be the difference between a successful visit and being overlooked entirely.
So what should you include within your meta description? Well a brief introduction to who you are and what you do is a good idea. Also, it’s quite worthwhile to mention anything that you feel makes you stand out from the crowd; unique services, limited time offers, or specialist items that are exclusive to you. In just a few lines or sentences, your website could be hugely popular from the very start, you’ll just need to make sure that your description doesn’t contain general text; it’s your greatest opportunity for a good first impression.
