Getting People to Click Through to Your Site

Each of your website pages should have a meta description. These two lines of text can appear in the search engine results under your meta title and should be used to encourage people to click through to your site.

Read on below and discover how to write great meta descriptions for your own website.

• Include your chosen keywords/phrases

Each page on your website should have its own unique meta description. The text should include your chosen keywords and phrases for each page. These keywords and phrases will be displayed in bold in the search engine results if they match part of someone’s search term.

For example if someone has typed “barbers Bristol”  into the search box and your meta description contains these words, they will be displayed in bold to help the user identify that your site is relevant to their query.

• Write your description as a sentence

Remember that the meta description is supposed to be just that. It shouldn’t be a list of keywords or a bunch of disjointed sentences.

Write your meta descriptions as s proper sentence and use them to summarise the page as well as encourage people to click through to your website.

• Don’t get carried away

Different search engines have their own character limits for meta descriptions. The main thing to consider is to keep your meta description clear and concise. Google’s limit is around 155 characters so if you write a description that’s more paragraph than summary, be prepared that much of it will be cut off from public view.

• Don’t spam

Your meta descriptions shouldn’t be a list of all the relevant keywords and phrases you can squeeze in. This will only serve to give the impression that your site is full of spam and will reduce your click through rate.

Don’t use your meta descriptions for an over-the-top hard sell either. Get across a main benefit to the consumer of using your product or service and why your company is different.

• Include a call to action

You obviously want people to click through to your site so why not ask them?

This can be direct or indirect. For example you could write “click through to our site” or “learn more information now…” at the end of your meta description to encourage people to visit your site.

If you liked this post you may also want to read the do’s and don’ts of meta titles

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under Search Engine Optimisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.