6. Consider your social media networks
Social media channels, like Facebook, pull kazakhstan whatsapp number the Meta description when you share a page – article, blog, press release, etc. – on your channel. This means you’re not just writing to get someone to click through when they conduct a Google search, but also when they come across your social media feed(s).
While I’m a firm believer that Meta descriptions are valuable, I’d be remiss if I didn’t share some interesting insight from Moz on when it’s okay to not use Meta descriptions:
Although conventional logic would hold that it’s universally wiser to write a good meta description rather than let the engines scrape a given web page, this isn’t always the case. Use this general rule of thumb to identify whether you should write your own meta description:
If a page is targeting between one and three heavily searched terms or phrases, write your own meta description that targets those users performing search queries including those terms.
If the page is targeting long-tail traffic (three or more keywords), it can sometimes be wiser to let the engines populate a meta description themselves. The reason is simple: When search engines pull together a meta description, they always display the keywords and surrounding phrases that the user has searched for. If a webmaster writes a meta description into the page’s code, what they choose to write can actually detract from the relevance the engines make naturally, depending on the query.
Some final thoughts…
Writing Meta descriptions are worth your time and energy. While not a direct ranking factor for Google search, they do affect other ranking factors like CTR, bounce rate, and time on site, and that’s as good a reason as any to spend some time making them right.
Also, just as it’s important to update your keyword list to reflect changes in searcher intent, it’s important to revisit your Meta descriptions (and titles) periodically as well. Not every month or even every other month. We usually revisit our client keyword lists and on-page ranking factors like Meta data every 6 to 9 months depending on the industry they reside in.
Lastly, to keep up with Meta data for your website it’s always a good idea to establish a process so that your new pages go live optimized. Press releases, blogs, and other on-the-fly dynamic content are crucial for improving SEO for your site. The problem is that they often go live un-optimized. Make sure your blogging team and your PR folks (and anyone else tasked with creating web content) follow a process of routing content through your SEO team. Here at C4, we call that GapSEO™ because it plugs a huge gap in your drive for website SEO success.
