Marketing Defined

Meta Description Tags are Showing Up in Google Search Engine Ranking Pages

Have you noticed how META Tag and Open Directory Project or DMOZ descriptions have begun taking the place of site body text in search engine result pages on Google?

This trend is clearly apparent in the Marketing Defined Blog’s search engine results, and whilst I personally belive this is a positive move, Dan Thies writing for SitePoint, laments for a moment about the “poor spelling skills” of Human editors at the ODP, who write up the META Description Tags.

Mr. Thies states they had not done his SEO Research Labs website any favours — well at least as far as spelling accuracy was concerned.

However, a quick follow-up in the ” comments” on the above Post in Site Point’s search engine marketing Blog, clarifies that at his request, DMOZ have now altered the spelling error in the META Description Tag. I wonder, if the ODP might have been that quick to come to the party, if it had been a request for a rewrite of a listing from a lesser-known public figure than the talented Dan Thies.

Point in case: some weeks have passed since I received an email confirming my Blog had been accepted for a listing in the Weblogs category at DMOZ , but lo and behold a few days after, the listing mysteriously disappeared from the ODP’s display — and 2 follow up emails to enquire why, have been met with a stony cold silence .

Well at the very least, it now appears my site will have an accurate description, in the mighty G’s SERPs — complements of this mishap!

For newcomers to Internet Marketing — as Google now appears to have returned at least for the moment to using META Description Tags to display results, it will prove profitable to put some thought into re- writing your entire site’s META Description Tags. This will ensure your Website outpulls the competition to a degree in the displayed results at Google.

Following on Google’s return to using META Description Tags, and because other major search engines use meta-tag descriptions when displaying a search query’s results, it’s important to accomplish two primary goals when undertaking this task:

1. Help obtain a good ranking in search engines that use meta tags to determine relevancy
2. Elicit a call to action - encourage people to click the link to your Web page.

Using a list of keywords in the meta-tag description is certainly not advisable. Not only does this amateur strategy border on spam, it’s also a poor way to encourage visitors to click the link to your site.

Some marketers like to repeat the HTML title-tag content in the meta-tag description. This is nonsensical.

If the title-tag content is automatically displayed as a hypertext link in a SERP, why would exact repetition (as a description) encourage people to click the link to your site? Some repetition is unavoidable, but wouldn’t it be more effective to add more qualifier words (such as local qualifiers) and a call to action?

To avoid any inaccuracies in the all important Description of your website in the SERPs… if the ODP description takes priority over a Site’s content in Google’s search engine results, it certainly is worth considering just forgetting to submit to DMOZ fullstop. Google will then have to use your carefully structured META Description Tags to display the results.

Mind you I am not undermining the SEO benefits of having a website accepted into the ODP (particularly if you are stuck in the proverbial Google sandbox)…. and, while I am reticent to comment on the spelling/grammatical skills of Editors at the ODP — it certainly is preferable in my books to write an effective META Description Tag for one’s own, or a client’s website, rather than have a third-party or human Editor at ODP come up with an ineffective description — This must, and will certainly affect the flow of much needed targeted traffic to a website.

My question is; Has anyone actually noticed this trend in the displayed results at Google ?

Technorati Tags:
Optimizing Meta Tags, Meta Description Tag, ODP submissions, DMOZ submissions