Do We Still Need A Meta Description?
Yes we do, and I just proved it, actually Google did. Everyone will tell you these days that you don’t need meta anymore, and not to worry about it because Google had stated it wasn’t being looked at anymore. Even some software you use to build websites will tell you that it’s NOT needed anymore. I want to share how my non ranking website when from page 5 to page 1 in two weeks after I fixed my meta description.
The Proof You Need A Meta Description
If you are familiar with Google Webmaster Tools, you know that you can use it to show you information about your website, including crawler errors. This mean when search engines scan the net they find your website and crawl it indexing your information so they can compare it with other relevant sites. When people do a search for information or products that you offer the search engines can offer your site in the search results. The more relevant your site is compared to others the better your ranking in the search engine results will be.
I launched two very identical sites, meaning the only difference between them was that one had an “S” at the end of the name and the other did not. I did everything the same, so I thought. One was crawled and indexed by Google within 4 days while the other was not indexed until about 3 weeks later. For another four weeks I monitored them watching my first site climb to page one while the other did not.
While reviewing the stats for these sites in Google Webmaster Tools I noticed that there were issues. One site had 5 crawler errors that I could see from the dashboard. The errors read “duplicate meta description”. I compared both sites and the other had no errors. Investigating deeper I see that I had copied the meta description exactly the same for 5 individual pages . Yep they were identical, but what’s the big deal? Meta including the description and keywords, I was told don’t matter anymore. Not the case. When you use meta properly it can help.
I changed the meta description to 5 totally different descriptions that explained each page individually and republished my site. Not more than 4 days later there were no crawler errors anymore and guess what it took about a week and a half and my site went from page 5 to page 1 position 6. Hummm. Using this information I went to check my other low ranking websites. There were some meta description errors and meta title errors, again saying duplicates.
The Purpose Of The Meta Description
Also checking my new rankings in the search engines I found that the meta description I was using was in fact showing up in the search results along with my page title of course. This is very “Key” because you can control you meta description thus controlling what people see in the search results. If your description is well written and very enticing then you will get visitors and potential buyers.
I now have top search engine placement for both of my websites but I get sales from one and not the other. I tested different meta descriptions and found that my CTR (Click through rate) increased. These sales are a direct relation to my meta description.





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