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Friday
Jun182010

Writing meta tags: the great equalizer

You may be out-ranked, but you can still out-traffic the competition

You pour blood sweat and tears into SEO, clawing your way to the top spot on Google, triumphing over adversity like Rocky climbing stair after stair in Philadelphia. And you still don’t get the clicks. 

Like your mother always told you, winning isn’t everything. Being in the top spot in search rankings doesn’t guarantee people will be impressed enough to click your link. It’s likely enough they’ll take a look at the few entries below you and go elsewhere. That’s why your click-through rate (CTR) is the real measure of your SEO success.

Getting that high CTR is all about your meta tag descriptions. These are often neglected since search engines have been ignoring them in their rankings for many, many years. Which doesn’t make much sense as, whether it’s organic search traffic or pay per click, the meta tag is where you pitch your website to surfers, telling them what they’ll find on your page and why it’s worth their time.

Big red arrow

 Follow the subtle arrow to find the meta tag

But hey, you’ve got the first spot, so you’ll still get most of the traffic right? Actually, you could be missing out on 80% of it. Traffic can vary between 20%-60% of clicks with a brilliant vs. rubbish meta tag description. If we’re talking about tens of thousands of searches, or more, that’s one heck of a lot of missed visits. 

Let’s look at an example. Here are the top 5 search results for “international ad agency.” Which one would you click on?

Top 5
I would go for the second or third entries and skip the other ones entirely since their meta tag descriptions are far from convincing. 

Now that you know how important the meta tags are, here are some tips for writing them:

  • Keep it within 150 letters as that’s all Google will show
  • Run searches for your keywords and take a look at what competing sites have written to get a better idea of how to make your tags stand out
  • Be convincing without being misleading - a good CTR doesn’t mean anything if you have a sky high bounce rate 
  • Think of them as ads for your website 

One last thought to mull over as you ponder how to handle your meta tags – if you don’t write them yourself, you may be in for some character assassination at the hands of Google. Just look what kind of spin the meta tag below put on an innocent writer, who in the context of the article is actually held in high esteem. Not so much on Google.

Leah

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