Okay, so we’ve all heard that meta tags have gone the way of the dinosaur, right? Well, that’s not quite true… sure, they don’t have much (if any) influence in your rankings, but they are a major piece of the puzzle when it comes to increasing your click through rates from whatever rankings you have.
Why? The search engines generally just scrape a few sentences from your content and display them on the SERPs, and while sometimes they sound pretty good, you really don’t have any control over what is displayed - so if Google shows gibberish or something that doesn’t look flattering, you could be losing out on some traffic.
What can you do about it? If you create a unique meta description tag for each of your static pages, then the search engines will often use your own handcrafted description over their own. This gives you an excellent way to make your page sound more informative/useful than your competition, which was too lazy to put in a few seconds of effort to make their page stand out! Their loss is your gain.
How do you make a meta description tag? It’s extremely simple, and doesn’t take a lot of time! All you have to do is put the following code into between your head tags:
<meta name=”Description” content=”A description of your page that will make your page look more relevant than the other results!” />
Don’t get carried away - if people click on your link because the description lead them to believe something they were looking for is on your page and it’s not, you’ll probably hurt yourself more than you help.
This is such a simple change to make, and it literally takes a minute or two to add it to your page. If you are ranked for any high traffic terms, you can’t afford to overlook this helpful little optimization technique.
Good Profits.
