The Indispensible Art of Writing Good Meta Descriptions

Joel Gales Sullivan
Last week I wrote about title tags, calling them the most important tool in getting good organic rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The topic this time is meta descriptions, which follow the title tag in the HTML of a page and also in order of importance by letting search engines know about your content.

Adding Meta Descriptions Using Rivista

Fortunately, adding a meta description to an issue, article or page is very simple using Rivista: you just add the sentence describing the content of the page to the field called Meta Description that is to the left just above the HTML editor field. Our system automatically places this sentence into the HTML of the page, enabling the spiders crawling the site to spot your key phrases.

While it is a good idea to have a unique meta description on every article and page, if some of your pages are lacking them, the HTML on the page will still contain a meta description. That's because the meta description set up at the parent page level is inherited by all pages beneath it—if there is no overriding text in the meta description field—so articles inherit from issues which get meta data from the publication.

Writing Effective Meta Descriptions

The most difficult part of adding a meta description to a page in the system is actually formulating a good sentence. Keep these points in mind when trying to come up with the perfect description for your content:
  • Short and simple is the rule. Keep meta descriptions to about 160 characters (including spaces) or fewer.
  • Use good keyword phrases, but avoid stuffing these in repetitively.
  • Echo keywords in the title if the title uses good keywords.
  • Pull the keywords (or the entire sentence) from somewhere in the first few lines of the page if the content lends itself to that easily.
  • Don't think like a company insider. That is, don't use the lingo familiar only to those in your line of business. Try to put yourself in the mind of the searcher and use common terms.
Let's take an example article that reviews a recently opened restaurant called Paris Moon. First, look at the title. Hopefully it's named something more telling than "Everyone's Best Kept Secret is Finally Out," like "Paris Moon Restaurant: Full of Surprises." The second alternative is still catchy enough but states the name of the restaurant and uses the word 'restaurant.'

You will want to craft a meta description using a few keywords like 1) the business name, 2) the business type and 3) geographical location. As this sentence should be complete and grammatically correct, a little editing of the article title could yield something like this:

Paris Moon,San Francisco's newest restaurant in Cole Valley, is full of surprises for its diners. Call 415/555.5555 for reservations.

This sentence will do just fine. It's short, simple and not stuffed full of keywords but features the most important ones: restaurant, Paris Moon, San Francisco, Cole Valley (an even narrower geographical area), and reservations.

Another good thing about this description is that the reservation number is right there. As Google will often use the meta description as the description on the search engine results page, searchers will see the number right in the SERPs so they can easily call the business.

As this sentence appears in the SERPs, remember to use good grammar and to write in a way that will appeal to readers. Use a good hook, like "full of surprises," to draw your readers in, and they will reward your efforts by clicking to read more.

Joel Gales Sullivan is Content Manager at Godengo and an avid student of search engine optimization, especially in regard to its use with Rivista. If you have questions or comments regarding optimizing your site, please contact her at joel(at)godengo(dot)com.

Posted by Super on April 4, 2008 at 12:12 PM in Search Engine Optimization | Permalink

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