Meta Description and SEO: Your Big Marketing Voice

I seem to be stuck on marketing with Google search results. With good reason, though...if your web site is like most, the majority of your traffic comes from Google.

In a previous post I discusses the importance of the title tag and how Google uses it in its display of search results. Heat maps show that most of the time spent looking at the search results page is on the upper-left part of the page, which tends to be the top three to five results.

The title tag, if you have one, is used for the link to your web site. Directly below is about 25 words of text that can come from the page being indexed, or from the meta description tag, if it exists.

If the title tag becomes your billboard, the description becomes your call to action. This is your 25-word chance to give readers (who spend just a second or two looking at the result) a compelling reason to visit your web site. Use action words here, and give the reader a reason to click. For KidPub we use the words 'visit', 'play', and 'read', and 'write' as well as 'safe' and 'fun' since our target is not only children but their parents.

The description goes into the meta description= tag. Take advantage of essentially free marketing by paying attention to how Google sees your pages, especially the title and meta description tags!