Meta descriptions play a crucial role in increasing the number of clicks that your site gets. Just under the Meta title and URL, comes Meta description where you can put all your efforts for selling your site. The space provided by the search engines for this description is very little. Therefore, it must be short, yet catchy and need to contain keywords that are popular among your target audience. Here are the top 8 SEO tips that can help you write effective Meta descriptions that are worth clicking.
Use Your Keywords Carefully
Proper keywording in Meta descriptions is of huge importance. You need to focus on a keyword that describes what your site is all about. Be it the content or the Meta description, the keywords that you’ll choose must be in both of them. Users may overlook these keywords but the search engines will surely notice them and will rank your page accordingly
Don’t Leave This to Search Engines
Don’t leave the auto creation of Meta description on the search engines! They may choose any text that they think is relevant or can just pick the first line of your site content as Meta description. You know your site better than anyone else; therefore you should be in charge of selecting the Meta descriptions as well.
Understand What Your Limits Are
To make the Meta descriptions more effective, you definitely need to follow the character limits almost blindly. The ellipsis that you get by crossing the character limits points out nothing but your carelessness and sloppiness in writing them. People click on a site depending upon how reliable it looks. Therefore, the Meta description that you write needs to be well-crafted and within limits.
Stop Copy Pasting From Your Web Page
The content of a site is written more in a story-telling approach, where you inform the users about your services and guide them step by step. Copy pasting a line or two from that content, is not going get your site the attention it needs. These contents are not optimized at all to work as a Meta description. Take time out and write your own catchy descriptions instead.
Be Honest with the Audience
Optimizing your site content, metadata or the keyword around a particular term, may bring you traffic but is worthless if the traffic is not interested in your site. Increased bounce rates can fetch attention of the search engines. But what is the benefit if the visitors are not interested in your products! Therefore, be honest with your audience and write click-worthy Meta descriptions.
Direct Approach Is the Best
There’s nothing better than writing the Meta descriptions directly referring to the audience. As you have a limited space, so don’t just waste it. Refer to the users as ‘you’ as many times possible, make them know why your page is important- utilize those 155 characters as better as you can.
Learn to Capture the USP
USP refers to unique selling proposition. It’s important to write the Meta description in such a way that it captures the USP. Try to quickly and specifically explain why users should click on your SERP entry over the other links, shown on the search engine result page.
Perform Checks
If you’ve done everything that is needed to be done, then probably it’s time that you conduct tests. Perform your own search for the keyword you want your site to rank for. If you find any trend, then make sure that you rewrite the meta description according to the latest update.
To catch the attention of maximum users, you need to write strong Meta descriptions as well. An effective Meta description not only grabs more people’s attention; but completes the optimization of a web page perfectly, while increasing the clicks on your website.