Email Delivery (8)
Guy 3DTV (3)
Cebu Jobs (2)
Cheat Codes (2)
DLL Files (2)Test Your Website
Learn how to increase visitor action, reduce site confusion for new visitors, and get those new visitors returning back for more! Get BWI's Usability and Design Analysis.
A Blog Description Google Seems to Like
By Robert Campbell on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Previous: Manage Intelligence Alerts with Google Analytics
Next: Last Day to Order Web Analysis at the Discounted Price
Over the past couple of years I’ve made a few posts about how to write a description meta tag. One of them, Your Description Sucks is about making sure that you write a good one, or Google will just use your content on what they think is best. The second one is, Google Wants You to Be More Specific, and that was the one that made me change how I do my own. The end results? A few days later Google was caching my posts with minutes.
Google Loves Structured Data
Google loves structured data so for this site, I give it to them a few different ways. The first way, is by site structure with the proper use of heading tags. My site is nicely outlined by heading tags, making BWI as the H1 tag, page titles as the H2 tags, and the heading tags within a post as H3 tags. Here is a popular post I did on how to use heading tags.
The second way is by using RDF’s. I mention how to use this in the Google Wants You to Be More Specific post as well. I use it to price out my analysis.
The third way, and the way that it seems to be really helping is the how to on my descriptions for posts.
Here is an example of my description tag:
<meta name=”description” content=”Make sure to put more time into your meta description. Google may just use your site content if the description meta tag is poorly graded by them., Published: 2009-10-05 13:24:03, Visitor Comments: 3″ />
The tag first displays the description I have custom written for the post, it then displays when I published it, and also mentions the number of comments. Google seems to love this, and I am guessing it could have something to do with the published date. No more worrying about who posted this comment first. I clearly clarify it. It also gives Google user a little more insight to the post by displaying the number of comments.
How I Do It
I know many of you swear by the SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. I don’t use it. Instead, I customized the header myself. The only real advantage I see to having the SEO Pack plugin is that it automatically adds your canonicol information. The canonicol information basically says, this is the original content. Well my descriptions says that, and here is how I do it.
When creating a post in WordPress, you will find the Excerpt field right below where you type in the post. This is where I type in my brief description. I do not add the time stamp or comments here. How could I yet?
What I have done is permanently edited the header file so when a post page is required it makes my custom description.
if ( is_single() )
$description = “<meta name=\”description\” content=\”$post->post_excerpt, Published: $post->post_date, Visitor Comments: $post->comment_count\” />
“;
I then echo $description where I want it. It’s all nice and structured, consistent, and even has the potential to add more information like the author. Anyone else have a blog post description that Google seems to love?
Like this post? Get website tips delivered by email straight to you. Full feed articles are delivered, and are managed by Google's Feedburner service.
Just Posted! Testing Your Journal
Related
Category: BWI, Code Tags: description, Google, heading tag, meta, RDF, structured data
Side note here, Google cached this post three minutes after I hit submit, and if you search for this posts title, guess how it ranks…#1
Thanks for the Tip! I too like to make changes directly in my theme code, instead of getting a plug-in. It is a simple and cleaner solution.
No hassle of upgrading either!
Wow that’s unbelieveable, sounds like a change that could well be worth making!
I’ve always taken a different approach and not bothered with a META description at all. I figured that by doing that, Google would choose an appropriate excerpt from the page, which presumably would be more relevant to the visitor’s search. But now I think I’ll experiment with this approach a bit!
Leaving the description in the hands of Google, is an opportunity missed out. A well crafted description works like an advertisement. Do you want Google displaying some random bit of content, or your call to action?
Yeah I guess that’s a valid point. My reasoning was that people could be finding my site through all sorts of varied search terms, so finding a ‘one-size-fits-all’ call to action could be difficult. Then again, I guess having any call to action is better than having none!
Thanks so much. I’m working on SEO for my site right now and this was really helpful.
I had the issue with random content displayed by Google recently and was wondering what caused it. I followed the tips you give here and now it works exactly as I wanted it to. Thanks for sharing!
Great! Glad to hear it’s working for you.
whats the optimal character length for a description?
I would say somewhere between 75-140 characters. The reason I say this, is because if you look at most Google snippets they are typically about 140 characters long.