Want a Website Analysis?

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.

Your Description Sucks

By Robert Campbell on Monday, October 5th, 2009 Print This Post
Previous: Half Way to a Sale
Next: Submit an Article while You are at It

Maybe I should title that, My Description Sucks. It was really about a post I made last week, A Site Without a Market Analysis. Rushing out the door after I made that post, I later found I was a little lazy in the Meta Tag Description. I knew it wasn’t the greatest of quality description, but apparently Google thought it was so bad, that it didn’t even use it!

Meta Description Doesn’t Mean Automatic Snippet Display

Did you know? When Google displays the results to your site it includes a snippet description. This snippet is typically filled with the content that is in your description meta tag. Just because you have a description meta tag though, doesn’t mean Google will use it. Google wants to use it, but if it has a low score (deemed by Google), it will not be displayed. Google would then simply use content found on site that it thinks is best, just like it does if no description meta tag was found.

screenshot of a text description snippet

Here is a post I also recently posted about the description meta tag. Google loves structured data, and you can really put that description tag to work. Google Wants You to Be More Specific

Get usability and design tips

Like this post? Get more website tips delivered straight to you by email. Full feed artiles are delivered, and are managed by Google's Feedburner service.

5 Comments - Post Yours

Get a detailed anaylysis of your website: BWI's Web Usability and Design Analysis

Just Posted! HTML and CSS Cheatsheet

Related

Category: Code, Search Tags: , , ,

Bookmark and Share

5 Comments on “Your Description Sucks”

  1. [...] More: Your Description Sucks [...]

  2. I find description tags are one of the last things I write when publishing an article and unfortunately by that time things start to fall apart and words don’t seem to come to mind as easily, I guess you could say its laziness.

    Nonetheless the title of this article is quite amusing.

    nice post.

  3. mark king says:

    What to do when description sucks? change it!

  4. [...] 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 [...]

  5. [...] High quality meta description tags for each page – Your Description Sucks [...]

Leave a Comment

Subscribe without commenting

Return to top of page