Google’s Matt Cutts released a quick video yesterday discussing meta descriptions for your website / blog pages and posts.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a ‘meta description’ is the short paragraph (usually up to 150 characters) which appears under the title in search engine results. So in the example below taken from a google search, the meta description is in black starting with the words ‘Video Tutorial’:
Some wordpress themes have a built in section for you to enter this information when you write a new page or post and for those that don’t, there are several SEO wordpress plugins that you can choose from to add this functionality.
Couple of things to note:
- The meta title and description effectively form a mini advertisement. You need both to be eye catching enough to encourage the person searching to click on it.
- Remember – any words that the searcher types into the google search box will appear in bold in the search results.
The basic rule of thumb is that if you are going to take the time to write individual meta descriptions they should be UNIQUE, no duplications – otherwise leave this information alone and let Google ‘Auto Generate’ the snippet for you.
If you don’t like the snippet google creates, you can always go back into the admin area of your blog / website page or post and edit it later.
Check out the full video for yourself:
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