We have written about one of the most important parts of your website’s search engine optimization, the Page Title, but there’s another aspect of SEO that is incredibly important – the Page Description.

The Basics:

• Between 150 and 170 characters
• Unique for each page
• Relevant and keyword rich for each page

<meta name=”description” content=”Your page’s meta-description should be between 150 and 170 characters, and for each page should be unique, relevant to that page, and rich with keywords. Add your city, state and other search terms.” />

A Few Examples:

“The Sacramento Medical Malpractice Attorneys at Bowman & Associates help clients across Northern California; medical negligence, doctor, diagnose, lawyer, misdiagnosis” (167 characters)

“Our experienced Chicago Breast Augmentation Plastic Surgeons of Marcus, LLC help clients across Illinois; breast enlargement, boob job, Mammaplasty, breast implants.” (165 characters)

Page Description – Best Practices:

While it’s easy to just fill your page’s description meta tag with keywords only, this is highly discouraged.

For one, it’s a frowned upon practice across search engines, and may cause you to lose ranking because of it. And secondly, your page’s title appears directly on search engine results, making it that much more important that it’s readable, cohesive and relevant.

Besides, by writing complete and targeted sentences, you may end up with search query strings that you wouldn’t have discovered before. For example, Google’s search results turn out the following data:

• Tampa dentist – about 642,000 results
• affordable Tampa dentist – about 513,000 results
• best Tampa dentist – about 86,600 results

As you can see here, the competition is lighter for “best Tampa dentist,” and therefore it would be easier to get to page one if you target certain keywords and phrases.

And as an aside, if you choose not to fill in the Page Description for your website, the search engines will automatically generate them for you by using one of the first blocks of text they find. This could be bad for your results is it might display your email newsletter subscription plea or your physical address and phone number – not helpful for someone who isn’t searching specifically for you.

New York SEO Specialists

We work directly with clients to create their online marketing plan and mold it to work best for search engines. If you would like help with the Search Engine Optimization on your website, contact our experienced web marketing specialists at Opuscule.