A tag that not always gets the full consideration it deserves. Although it does little for your pure “SEO” ranking, a well formulated tag can increase a pages click through rate from the search engine results page. The main job of this tag is that it normally forms the snippet of text in the search engine results page. (although not always)
Meta Descriptions - The Basics.
If you look in the head section of your page mark-up it should look something like this:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your
descriptive sentence or two goes here.">
Ok so implementing a good meta description on your site is
not going to improve your SEO rank..why bother? I hear you shout....
Search engine results page: Google:
Here we can see how important the meta description tag is. It has formed the main search engine result snippit “The UK's #1 site to buy and sell new and used
cars, bikes, vans, trucks and caravans with over 350000 vehicles online. Check
Car news, reviews and obtain “
With the Google search site
links, a truncated version of the child pages meta descriptions have been used,
so not only is it important that you have good standard meta description, they
need to be able to degrade when truncated as well.
Meta Description – What to
Remember.
1. Meta description lengths –
You can go longer but they will be truncated
Google: 156 characters (inc
spaces)
Yahoo: 72 characters (inc spaces)
Bing: 65 characters (inc spaces)
Ask: 69 characters (inc spaces)
Yahoo: 72 characters (inc spaces)
Bing: 65 characters (inc spaces)
Ask: 69 characters (inc spaces)
2. Meta description duplications - Don’t duplicate your meta descriptions; every
page should have its own description. If
you are having trouble writing unique meta description pages you should be
considering why you have such similar pages of content.
3. Character usage - Do not include any non-alpha/numeric
characters in your description as this can result in your meta description being
truncated.
4. Truncation - Ensuring that your Meta
description is understandable when truncated and used in site links. In the above example the descriptions have
been reduced in length. Autotrader’s still read acceptably when truncated but
there is definitely further room for optimisation.
Meta description - Advanced usage.
*sorry about bad recording (not my video)
There is a lot of buzz
around using Rich Snippets at the moment - and rightly so....
Google is now actively promoting the usage of rich snippets. This
can potentially add additional information to your sites search result. This is achieved by ensuring that your page is fully understood by search
engines, by using extended mark-up to define content elements.
There are currently 3 main supported mark-up types:
Microdata – The HTML 5 mircodata specification
Microformats – the full break down of supported mark-up can be found here
RDFa - Resource Description Framework the W3C recommendation for attribute extensions for xhtml.
All of this data can create snippets that have much more information If you can give users as much information on the search engine results page, the theory goes that your site will receive a much beter click through rate, and this sounds right in theory...
Microformats – the full break down of supported mark-up can be found here
RDFa - Resource Description Framework the W3C recommendation for attribute extensions for xhtml.
All of this data can create snippets that have much more information If you can give users as much information on the search engine results page, the theory goes that your site will receive a much beter click through rate, and this sounds right in theory...
Example of their snippets: the film “One Day”
The "rich" part of the snippets in this example are:
- Rating
- Directed by
- Starring
The mark-up that has been used to achieve this is:
Rating
itemprop="aggregateRating" - line 572 itemprop="bestRating - line 597 itemprop="reviewCount" - line 602 Film information itemprop="director" - line 630 itemprop="actors" - line 648 itemprop="datePublished" - line 1866
There are number of predetermined schema types:
there is a full list at http://schema.org which is worth a check out.
So have a play and Google have also been kind enough to provide us with a rich snippets testing tool so enjoy:
Twitter: @MartinMcAndrew
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