Most of us know that the major search engines pretty much ignore what’s in the meta description tag when it comes to ranking your site but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it completely. It now serves a very important – albeit slightly different – purpose.

Back in the day, meta tags were used to help the search engines work out what your website was about and rank your site based on how relevant it thought it was top the search being performed.

These days it is much less of a ranking factor, but is instead used to describe what your website is about within the search results, as seen below:

Google search results for an 'SEO' search showing snippets taken from the meta description tag

Although it doesn’t have an effect on your rankings within the search results, you should still put some time and effort into creating a good description that grabs interest.

Use it to attract visitors that may otherwise skip over your positions within the search results, particularly if you aren’t quite at positions #1. I don’t mean fill it with crazy characters, but make it salesy. Grab attention and pull people onto your site.

Think about what makes you unique. If you are cheap then includes prices. If you are the only supplier, make sure you include that along with what you do and what you offer. If potential visitors aren’t sure what you do after reading your snippet of text within the search results then they aren’t as likely to click onto your site and not only are potential sales lost, but the hard work that’s going into your SEO campaign is being wasted.

If Google finds that your meta description tag doesn’t describe your site accurately or informatively it will choose to pull search snippets from elsewhere, including the content on the page and external sites such as the DMOZ and Yahoo directories if they fit the bill better.

Top Tips:

• Keep your meta description tag to less than 150 characters. 100-150 is a good guideline.
• Make it precise but informative
• Grab attention with your description while getting across important details in a few words as possible.
• Include keywords. Although they don’t affect your rankings the keywords you search for are highlighted within the search results, helping your listing to stand out and spear relevant to the users search.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been around ever since people started to use the Internet to make money. It has changed a lot over the years, from keyword stuffing and filling your page with h1s to trick the search engines to link farms (remember them?) and blog commenting – these quick fixes have come and gone. The search engines are smart, they know when they’re being fooled, and they update their algorithms accordingly.

So, how can we ensure our SEO stands the test of time? Well, there is one eternal truth to SEO.

Search Engines offer a service for their USERS

What does this mean? It means that at the end of the day Google, Yahoo, Bing etc want to put the best website at the top for all search queries. They create complex algorithms to achieve this, and are constantly updating the processes to ensure their users are well satisfied.

Google have even given us a preview of their latest update “Caffeine”, not easily testable here in the UK, but it does give us an idea about the way things are going.

We can see that Google want to bring more content rich sites to the forefront – sites that are useful to their users. So that’s what you need to be producing – websites that are useful and interesting. We can see that Google will be placing more emphasis on social media and micro-blogging platforms, such as Twitter, so connections are seen as important too.

How will all this pan out in the years to come? I’m not really sure because I don’t have a crystal ball… But, I do think its important to think of your customers or potential customers first, then the search engines second, after all it’s pretty obvious that the search engines take things like bounce rate, time on site and visitor numbers into consideration when creating their indexes.

So, take time to check your analytics. How can you reduce your bounce rate? Test, test, test – there is no hard and fast rule, but you can re-write your copy, change the images on your site, change the headings and title tags, anything that will make a difference can be tested and improved upon. To improve the time on site you could put interactive tools such as videos or audio that your visitors can watch or listen to, though paradoxically this can increase your bounce rate, so keep on testing until you get the balance right. Change the content on your site, make sure it’s well written but easy to read, and has a clear call to action to increase conversion.

Make your site easy for the search engine spiders to crawl by creating well-structured webpages that interlink to each other. Make sure all your pages pass W3C validations.

Off-site optimisation techniques such as link building are still important, I can’t see the search engines ever abandoning this, but make sure you are clever about your campaign. One ‘good’ link is always going to be more valuable than 100 ‘bad’ links. Obtaining the ‘good’ links is difficult and time consuming, but can be done. Write press releases, and distribute articles to online article sites to acquire relevant links. Submit your sites to social bookmarking sites to increase visitor numbers, but try to find a niche SB site to reduce the likelihood of your bounce rate increasing.

Check your site for duplicate content. You can use a variety of online tools to do this. If someone else has copied your site, or you’ve inadvertently copied content (which can happen – especially if more than one person is responsible for the site) make sure you rewrite it so that your site no longer displays the same content as other sites. Regularly check your content, and update it when it has been around for a while – nobody likes stale content – this should minimise your risk of being copied, and satisfy your visitors.

And finally, help the search engines out by providing a sitemap of your site. This is like a contents page or index in a book, it gives a list of everything in your site and the page where certain things are placed. It just makes the job of the search engine spiders easier, and they will reward you for it.