In my previous post in “their influence in SEO, I touched on the importance of Title Tags in search engine optimisation. Today I will be discussing Meta Descriptions within each page.

1) Title Tags
2) Meta descriptions
3) Optimised page content
4) Incoming links
5) User friendly URL’s (no session ID’s)

The importance of meta descriptions in a web page is not important if the page’s content is optimised correctly but it is always good practice to ensure that the keywords in the meta description correspond with the page’s title tag.

Search engines read the meta descriptions and check if their keywords are inserted in the title tags, if they are not they will read the content on the page. If neither the keywords in the page’s content nor the meta descriptions match the title tag there is no hope of achieving high rankings. The simple truth.

An example of a Meta Description in code:

<meta content=“small business online marketing specialists. WebGrowth
helps small businesses grow their online market share and increase
sales leads from effective online marketing..” name=“description” />

An example of a Title Tag (underlined text) and a Meta Description (smaller text below Title Tag) used in a snippet of Google’s search results:

As you can see I have inserted my keyphrase both in the beginning of the title tag and the meta description. This ensures that the search engines know that I am targeting that particular phrase and will realise that it is important to that particular web page. If I had inserted, “WebGrowth - Small business online marketing specialists” then “WebGrowth” would have been viewed as more important and so “small business online marketing” would have dropped in search rankings.

So in summing up, ensure that keywords within meta descriptions and title tags of each web page correspond. Each web page should target a different keyphrase so it has effective keyword density. Tools like Webmaster Tools and Analytics can help you focus on which keywords/phrases are working and which are not. It is important to monitor each web page’s performance. So instead of having only your home page receiving organic traffic you can effectively market other web pages as well, which will increase your ROI with SEO.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 11:19 am and is filed under Google Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.