Big Oak SEO Blog

Use the META Description Tag - SEO Tip Week 3

All web sites should use the META description tag. If you have too many pages to add it to, at least put it on your home page and any core pages that bring in search result traffic. Google will use the META description you place on your site if the user searched for a keyword that exists in the META description. Google is giving us some measure of control.

How best to use this you may ask? You need to think like a radio advertising writer. What can you say in one brief sentence that will entice a user to click your link rather than the one above or below. A little sensationalism never hurt.

A brand message can help or you can put your phone number in the META description. Think out of the box; how about a offer a discount or advertise a sale. Be careful though, if you put a sale message and when the sale ends your message might still display until Google updates your site listing. You don’t want your text in the search results still announcing a sale that is over. Ultimately you should tell searchers your unique selling proposition.

Remember that your META description will only show if the search term is in the META description. While this can be tricky, it can be done with some forethought. You can do this for all of your targeted pages and have dozens of marketing messages.

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Controlling Google Descriptions

This is pretty cool. Google is adding support for a new META tag, so that you can tell them NOT to use the description at Open Directory Project (ODP). It’s hard to get old or outdated descriptions updated on ODP. So this is great in those situations.

The way Google descriptions (snippets) are generated that appear under a page in the search results is completely automated. The process uses both the content on a page as well as references to it that appear on other sites.

One source Google uses to generate snippets is the Open Directory Project. Some site owners want to be to able to request not using the ODP for generating snippets, and google has added support for this. All you have to do is add a meta tag to your pages.

To direct all search engines that support the meta tag not to use ODP information for the page’s description, use the following:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP">

To direct Google specifically from using this information to describe a page, use the following:

<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOODP">

For more information, visit the webmaster help center.

Once you add this meta tag to your pages, it may take some time for changes to your snippets to appear. Once Google has recrawled your pages and refreshed our index, you should see updated snippets.

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