Should I include A Description Tag for an article page

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi, I am wondering if i should include a description tag for an article page where the news on that page will change around five times a day.

I am not sure if to fill a description in for local news or to leave it blank so the search engines pick up the latest local news and then the next day they show the latest local news again in the search engines instead of having a static description of the news page.

any help would be great

[JamesNorquay]

No problem, my advice further to this is also to try and get your site included into Google news as this is going to be one of your best traffic sources for local news.

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for this. i will follow your advice.

[DougRoberts]

I'd agree with James.

I'd use the description and title of the news page to clearly communicate the kind of news that's going to be presented so that visitors are going to have a good understanding of what to expect when they land on your news page.

I would leave the news articles to speak for themselves instead of having to compete with the news page.

If it's local news then I'd make sure that the area covered was also clear.

You've got to think about this from the users perspective. There will be people looking out for particular news stories that interest them, so they'll be attracted by the individual article that engages them. Others, will be looking a little more broadly for news in their area, or around their topic and it's these searches that your news index page can target.

I'd also make sure that the content on my main news index had clear calls to action to help people subscribe to my news feed  -RSS, mailing lists etc . (and on all the article pages too).

You can get a lot of one-touch traffic to news pages. You need to make an effort to find ways to get them coming back.

[evolvingSEO]

I would agree with James and say put a description tag. In addition to what he says, remember that Google choose what text to display in the description based upon the words in the query. So if the query matches something more relevant to a recent article, they will likely ignore your description tag and show a snippet of the article instead.

-Dan

[JamesNorquay]

To be honest I would put a fixed description on the page even if it changes 5 times a day.

You can have a description which is targeted to the news page and also a title which is targeted to the news page, rather than a random news story from that day.

In my eyes having a fixed description is a better strategy.

Another thing you can look at doing is if your site is added via Google news you can obtain Google news site links for the latest news, this is more of an advanced strategy, more information here:

http://jamesnorquay.com/google-news-additional-site-links-feed/

(only a limited number of sites have this)