Meta Description Question

[freestone]

Is it ok to put your domain name in the meta description if that is the name of your company?  so if my company name is BlaBla.com and I want to have a meta description like

Shop for your next Widget at BlaBla.com.   We have Widget in 30 colors.  Free shipping for orders over $50.

and I am obviosuly promoting the widget page is this ok.  I am concerned that Google will not like the domain name in the meta description.  After Peguin I am paranoid about my shadow.....LOL

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi John,

Let me repeat, know of no evidence of Google penalizing a site because of keyword use in the meta description tag. So including it or removing it here will most likely have little impact on your rankings, although it may impact your CTR. Having the your site name in both your title and meta description should be fine, at least from a ranking perspective.

Here's a hypothetical situation where you can get into trouble:

70% of your inbound anchor text is all the same keyword
The keyword is the first word of your title tag, and appears 2-3x
The keyword is stuffed in your body text.

Yes, it's hard NOT to have your keyword as anchor text when you have an exact match domain, but there seems to be at least some evidence of Google hitting sites that have overly optimized exact match anchor text, even for branded domains. The jury is still out, but diversifying your inbound anchor text seems like a smart strategy.

[freestone]

Thanks Cyrus I am not sure what you mean by

"The meta description aside, anywhere your money keyword phrase is used that it can count is a place you want to be careful about."

You mean not to abuse Anchor Text ?  When you domain and company name are both an EDM (a great thing to have in the past) it is hard not to use it in Anchor.  I guess what you are saying is dont use mysite.com as anchor instead use My Site or Here?

Oh right now I have mysite.com in the title and in many of the meta descriptions so it sounds like I should remove it from one or the other.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

As Ben said, as far as we know Google doesn't use the meta description in it's ranking algorythm in any significant way. And I haven't seen any evidence changing in light of Penguin. So if it's natural for you to include it in your meta description, I'd encourage you to do so.

That said, if your domain is an exact match and it's a keyword you use a lot, I would encourage you to be careful in other areas of over-optimization (title tag, inbound links, keyword stuffing, etc.)

The meta description aside, anywhere your money keyword phrase is used that it can count is a place you want to be careful about.

Additionally, here's a couple of my favorite articles on Penguin:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguins-pandas-and-panic-at-the-zoo

http://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-analysis-seo-isnt-dead-but-you-need-to-act-smarter-and-5-easy-ways-to-do-so/

[freestone]

Very good points.  I would like the company name (same as domain name) to go either in the title of the description but I like your idea to put it in the Description and re-think the title for a call to action.

In some cases Google is using info from my footer instead of the Meta Description in the SERPs?

[BenFox]

Google doesn't really look at the meta description anymore so I wouldn't stress about it.

Although personally I'd not include the domain name in the meta description as you're probably mentioning the brand name in the title tag and it's going to appear directly above the description in tiny green writing anyway. So why not fill your title tag with things designed to encourage a high click through? Things like "Free shipping on orders over $50. Widgets available in 30 colours including popular colour 1, popular colour 2 and popular colur 3."

[freestone]

I am beginning to realize that being an SEO is like being a Doctor or a Lawyer.   You get to practice your entire career and people actually tolerate that behavior.

[freestone]

Oh and thanks for letting me know that I am not alone staring at the dark object on the floor and wonder were it took so much traffic.  Until April 24th I had no idea shadows were black and white and liked the cold.

[freestone]

I guess I should also mention that the name of this company is also an Exact Domain Match (EDM) of a great key word within this industry.

So I am now afraid that if I don't take out all my references to the actually company name out of the Description I will get penalized for stuffing.

Putting the name of the company is very typical for e-commerce company.

[BenFox]

I don't foresee this being a problem.

At all.

And I know what you mean about being scared of your own shadow