Help with Effective Meta Description
-
Can someone give me a sample of an effective meta description tag? All of the best practice stuff I read doesn't talk about how to raise CTR. It seems to me that this is a neglected area of SEO, and we want to do this right. Obviously, we will need to test.
For example, my main home page keyword is "IT Support"
Things I might want to put in the tag:
Free Network Assessments
100% Risk Free Trials
"Relentless IT Support" (Major Theme)
30 Years of Experience (since 1984)
Eliminate your IT Support Headaches Forever (Too long)
Call to action?
BTW, Thanks to everyone for your help. This is a great community. Solid advice from experts.
Here's an example of what I would create
Relentless IT Support Since 1984. Trust and Accountability. 100% Risk Free Trials. Contact us today for Free IT Assessment.
-
Are you any good at what you?
How wil the prospective customer benefit form hiring you?
Do you have satisfied customers ?
Who is your target audience?
You need to hit as many of these crucial points as possible. It's hard! Writing meta descriptions is a bit like writing haiku.
Mentioning both the free assessment and free trial may be a mistake. It's a mixed message that is overly complicated.
Maybe something like:
Thousands of satisfied customers love our over- the- top IT support. Find out why during your free trial. May we delight you?
or:
With over 30 years experience, we delight customers with our over-the-top 24/7 IT support. Ask for a free trial today.
-
Hi Rahul,
I prefer a short overview of what the page/company is all about with a call to action at the end. I also much prefer proper sentences and not bullet points or similar. Something like:
XXXXXX company has been offering trustworthy 24/7 IT support services since 1984. Contact us today for a free IT assessment and a 100% risk free trial.
Check out this serp preview tool, it is really useful in getting an idea of how your site will actually show up, I use it all the time! http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html
-
Based on my experiences sentences work better, but need to match the query as close as possible. Also, it is essential to use the target kw as naturally as possible and include a CTA.
-
Hi Rahul,
Your meta needs to have a call to action in it as well as containing your main keyword for that page. In my experience, I would suggest having your call to action first and then a reason why they would want to visit your website.
For example, "Contact us today for your free IT assessment from a company with nearly 30 years experience".
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Translating meta tags using WPML and AIO SEO
Having a heck of a time finding info on this one... We're working on a multilingual website which uses WPML. I've used the All in One SEO plugin to customize meta data (title, description, etc). These strings do not appear in the list of translations in WPML. Does anyone have any experience with this setup? How do you enable WPML to translate meta data set via the AIO plugin? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jonmc0 -
Software assisted meta data
I was recently contacted by an SEO firm that did a search on my site and said it had a low index. Out of 5,000+ pages only 800 keywords was ranking. They said there is much improvement for adjusting my meta data for indexing. They said there is a software that does this for you. Does anyone have any experience with this? Does this sound true what they are explaining? What is this software and how much does it cost? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchachula0 -
Video SERP Help
Hello Friends,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KINQDOM
I try to appear on search results of property related search terms with my property videos. Here is a sample property video
http://www.antalyahomes.com/videositemap.asp May you please check it and tell me what I do wrong? Thanks in advance for your time.0 -
Robots.txt help
Hi Moz Community, Google is indexing some developer pages from a previous website where I currently work: ddcblog.dev.examplewebsite.com/categories/sub-categories Was wondering how I include these in a robots.txt file so they no longer appear on Google. Can I do it under our homepage GWT account or do I have to have a separate account set up for these URL types? As always, your expertise is greatly appreciated, -Reed
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Alternative Markup Challenge. Can anyone help?
I have a challenge around alternative markup. We currently operate a single domain with geo-targeted folders and alternative markup implemented. We are now now looking to expand this out to non-English content. Current Implementation; All generic English language content hosted on the main domain, with x5 English language content variations (locales) available under a folder structure (.com/en-us/ etc.). Alternative markup is in place for all locales within the HTML, implemented automatically by developers via the CMS. Locale folders geo-targeted via GWT and Bing WT. Planned Launch; Introduction of 5 new non-English locale folders (e.g. /de-de/ etc.), targeted to their respective country and language. Content language will be mixed, with around 1/10 of pages translated and the other 9/10 of pages (business listings) having their body content remain in English, with headers / footers translated. Locale folders will be geo-targeted via GWT and Bing WT. Folder and markup usage TBC. Options; Folders; Implement folder structure /de/, attempting to indicate country but not language (issue; usually a single identifier indicates language, not country?). Implement /de-de/ folder structure to match the English locales and maintain correct country targeting (issue; some content is not in language). Alternative markup; Do not make use of markup at all. Implement CMS based automated markup on all English and non-English content throughout the locale (e.g. /de-de/), but exclude English language versions (e.g. /en-gb/). Attempt manually implementing markup to bridge the English and non-English locales, potentially creating future issues with new content going live and content being removed. A heavy risk. Current approach is webmaster tools targeting, a /de-de/ folder structure and automated implementation of markup. This means English language URLs will have markup and non-English language URLs will have markup, but they will not match up (e.g. English pages will never have markup for non-English language content). If you minds haven't melted, what's your thoughts? Any help is much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HelloAlba0 -
Help! Why did Google remove my images from their index?
I've been scratching my head over this one for a while now and I can't seem to figure it out. I own a website that is user-generated content. Users submit images to my sites of graphic resources (for designers) that they have created to share with our community. I've been noticing over the past few months that I'm getting completely dominated in Google Images. I used to get a ton of traffic from Google Images, but now I can't find my images anywhere. After diving into Analytics I found this: http://cl.ly/140L2d14040Q1R0W161e and realized sometime about a year ago my image traffic took a dive. We've gone back through all the change logs and can't find where we made any changes to the site structure that could have caused this. We are stumped. Does anyone know of any historical Google updates that could have caused this last year around the end of April 2010? Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shawn810 -
My site is duplicated on the internet, please help.
I've been told that my site: "- your site is duplicated on the internet. Both www.joeyvalyphotography.com and joeyvalyphotography.com are valid internet addresses. This is a problem for SEO." I am wondering, what's the cause of this, and how it can fixed. Thanks In advanced, Joey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaji0 -
Yoast meta description in ' ' instead of " " problem
Hi Guys this is really strange, i am using yoast seo for wordpress on two sites. On both sites i am seeing meta name='description' instead of meta name="description" And this is why google is probably not reading it correctly, on many other link submission sites which read your meta data automatically say site blocked. How to i fix this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0