Testing the power of Meta. Today I decided to do a little test, and as time goes on I will share the results. I’m sure many of you have heard of the forum, Digital Point. It has an Alexa rank of 240, so you can be certain millions of people have heard of it. Anyhow, a post I wrote a while back about the forum being down, ranked 10th or better for the keyword “Digital Point Forum” on Google. You could imagine I get a ton a traffic from that. Well, I don’t.

Ranking Well Doesn’t Do All the Work

Just because the post is ranking well, currently 6th, it doesn’t mean I’m going to get clicks. The title of the post is the first turn off. “Digital Point Forum Down”, I don’t think many will be clicking on that when looking for their forum. The meta description, this is what this post is about, was simply the first sentence of the post. When I made the post, I was not thinking keyword value or anything. It was simply a notice to my visitors, and I put little effort into optimizing it. The end result, poor title and description generating poor click thrus. Want to know how poor? In all of March Google analytics reported just 1 visitor to the post from the search keyword “Digital Point Forum”, even though it was a fairly popular post to my regular readers.

Getting More Clicks

So knowing I only got one click for all of March from Google for that search term is a little disappointing, but it can now make a great example. Here is how a  great description described in your meta tag can change these horrible numbers. Instead of using the first boring sentence from the post like I was, I have changed the description to say this, “Before you join the Digital Point Forum, read this”. I have turned the description into an ad. Think it will beet last months report of just one click?

Another thing to consider here is if I didn’t change that meta, and continued to not get clicks, think Google will keep ranking that post well? I think not. The race is on for me to take the opportunity, and start getting those visitors to click the free ad, I mean meta description. I’ll make a post next week on how it’s going. First I need the page to get cached again. Look for Putting Your Meta to Work Part II.