For those that don’t know, meta descriptions are a hidden part of each of your webpages. They play an important part in your search engine optimization strategy so much that you can see the results in the above picture what happened to the traffic when they were accidently removed and subsequently re-enabled:
In Google, when you search for a something, it will usually show part of the meta description below the website URL in search results. See the picture on the left to see what I’m talking about. The text that shows up is the text in the meta description for Giant Concepts.
By complete accident, I recently overwrote the default setting for the Meta Description on one of Giant Concepts websites. This careless mistake led to a dramatic drop in organic search traffic for this website. The website has over 2000+ pages indexed in Google, and all of them lost their Meta Description. I certainly don’t check that my Meta Descriptions are in place on a daily basis on all our websites, but I do periodically check my analytics to look at current trends on all the websites that we maintain. It took nearly two weeks for me to notice that this website had significant drop in organic search engine traffic (it actually only affected Google traffic, as Bing and Yahoo remained consistent). The graph not only shows how quickly and dramatically the traffic dropped but how fast it came back once it was re-implemented.
If your website is not performing as you’d like it, try adjusting your Meta Descriptions. It is a reminder of how important properly worded Meta Descriptions can be for your overall search engine marketing strategy. Here are a few suggestions for properly worded Meta Descriptions, not a complete guide but enough to get you on your way:
- Meta Descriptions should be between 145 – 165 Characters.
- Should NOT just be a bunch of keywords separated by commas.
- If you are doing ecommerce, each of your products should have a different meta description.
- Each unique page that is search relevant (non search relevant pages would be: contact forms, privacy policy, etc) should have a meta description.
- If you have one or two specific keywords you are targeting, you might want to use those words 2 or 3 times in your meta description.
