Another post on Small Business Mavericks caught my eye this morning so thought I would follow up on what the latest gossip was on the topic. The post – How Your Meta Description Will Help You Rank Higher – reminded me of how I almost doubled my traffic on one of my blogs just by beefing up the meta description.
Meta descriptions are used by the search engines as the snippet when your site appears in the search results – sometimes. That is often the problem. Google for one will decide on the text for the snippet. From what I can gather, it will look at the meta description tag but if it decides its not appropriate then it will find text that is, often from the first paragraph. (So make your first paragraph an extension or new version of your meta description perhaps?).
The latest comes from Chris Crum at WebProNews where he talks about rich metadata and how that effects your listing in search results. This will take a little thought and more investigation I think. I don’t know how appropriate it will be for blogs, but for web pages it could be a real plus. I wonder now if there will be developing niche for those that can learn the markup language used. It could be the next best thing in SEO I think.
With comScore reporting a 46% growth in search, it certainly isn’t dying as some have been predicting. I do wonder whether or not the art of SEO itself is starting to feel the pinch. Search results are no longer based purely on ‘relevant pages’. You now have local search results together with a map (for some searches), results appearing based on where the searcher is located geographically, and other results such as images, videos, news and blogs. I know before Christmas I did a search the results page was almost full of featured results. The organic results were limited to about five and were well below the fold.
As an example, type in Barack Obama in a Google search window. The results verify what I have pointed out. In order of appearance in the search results:
- News items related to Barack Obama
- BarackObama.com listing
- Wikipedia
- real time search results window
- image results
- organic results
The organic results start about two-thirds of the way down the page. My suggestion – if you want to appear in search results for Barack Obama, you will probably have more luck using social media and appearing in the real time search results.
Well defined meta descriptions, a good opening paragraph and perhaps the include of rich metadata could mean the difference between winning that click from the searcher or being overlooked for someone who has done it better. I wonder what the search results will look like in two or three years time? Can anyone remember what the search results looked like three years ago?
Fortunately, for now, SEO can still win traffic. Google isn’t the only search engine in town and results like those for Barack Obama are not quite the norm. In the future, who knows, organic results may not start until page two – and who looks there?
