The Google Webmaster Central Blog has published a news concerning Meta Description, a important element of snippet. Thus, this news explains why it is pertinent to write a good Meta Description on each page of your Website. Here is index of this Google news :
- Why does Google care about meta descriptions ?
- What are some good meta description strategies?
- Differentiate the descriptions for different pages.
- Include clearly tagged facts in the description.
- Programmatically generate descriptions.
- Use quality descriptions.
I have noticed a good example in this article :
Not as desirable:
<META NAME= »Description » CONTENT= »[domain name redacted]
: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré by J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPré »>
There are a number of reasons this meta description wouldn’t work well as a snippet on our search results page:
- The title of the book is complete duplication of information already in the page title.
- Information within the description itself is duplicated (J. K. Rowling, Mary GrandPré are each listed twice).
- None of the information in the description is clearly identified; who is Mary GrandPré?
- The missing spacing and overuse of colons makes the description hard to read.
All of this means that the average person viewing a Google results page — who might spend under a second scanning any given snippet — is likely to skip this result. As an alternative, consider the meta description below.
Much nicer:
<META NAME= »Description » CONTENT= »Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPré, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages »>
What’s changed? No duplication, more information, and everything is clearly tagged and separated. No real additional work is required to generate something of this quality: the price and length are the only new data, and they are already displayed on the site.