Meta Descriptions are so damn important.
Search engines love to know what each page is about, but more importantly it is Your Ad Space, Your Ad Copy, Your Call To Action on the search engine result page. If you have a crappy non-attractive Meta Description you can loose potential click throughs to your site.
People over look using the meta description tags on their site all the time. For example, I was checking the search engine placement for my Survivor China Fan Site with the keywords “Survivor China” in 3 major search engines.
What I saw in Google:
Now my site ranks #2 and the official CBS website ranks #1 (of course they are going to rank number 1).
I noticed that description under the cbs listing had changed from Google pulling on page content to “Official site. Includes profiles on the original contestants, video clips, games, and commentary.” I thought sweet those numb nuts over at cbs got it right finally and started using a meta description on the home page. Well I took a look at their homepage source code and noticed:
[meta name="description" content="" />
What no meta description!? Where is it coming from? Well lucky me I know Google will pull a sites Dmoz Description for the search engine results page if a site is missing one or thinks it is shitty. Ahhhh Haaa I that was the case. Google was pulling their DMoz description. The funny thing it is for the first season of Survivor!
Lucky for the numbnuts over at CBS Google used the first season Dmoz Description or they would still have a crappy meta description. I mean how hard is it cbs to place meta description on the home page that talks about survivor china and is a little more attractive.
Hell look at mine “UnOfficial site for Survivor China on CBS. Learn about the cast, the latest news, and Survivor Forum”. It is not the most attractive but it is better than yours and hell look at your title tag as well! I will leave that for another rant!
Well lets continue to see what I found out on the other search engines.
What I saw in Yahoo:
As you can see this was better, but it is still pulling from their Yahoo Directory Submission. I guess that $299 dollars is paying for itself now!
What I saw in MSN:
Here is a perfect example of what happens when you do not have a meta description tag. A crappy description on in the search engine result page.
“Visiting Tribal Council for the second time in a row, the Zhan Hu tribe opts to vote out feisty Ashley Massaro over their outspoken leader, Dave, in hopes of achieving tribal …” That looks very enticing to click on!
Hopefully my little rant show you the importance of having a meta description tag on your website pages.
Shame on you CBS for forcing me to bitch slap you!
October 11th, 2007 at 11:29 am
I used to direct SEO for Viacom (i.e. CBS, although CBS has now split from Viacom and formed CBS Interactive). When I approached the execs for CBS.com about optimization they essentially told me to go suck an egg.
Since then, I believe they hired a big agency to oversee SEO, but I’m not sure.
The lesson is this: Just because a site is owned by a mega corporation doesn’t mean that they have their act together in terms of SEO.
October 11th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
I think the online media world is just recently catching onto why SEO is important. They’ve been so stuck on “should we break stories on the web” type stuff, that it’s taken them a minute to finally stumble onto the bandwagon that they do have to participate on the Internet or they will get trumped hard. Title tags, meta description, this type of stuff is not common knowledge to many online producers. But definitely something they should all know
October 12th, 2007 at 5:03 am
I would be very surprised to learn that website developers didn’t know about meta titles and descriptions. Their use has been stressed over and over again on various web forums and articles.
I think meta tags are mostly ignored because everyone thought Google stopped using them. They were reported as being unhappy about web developers trying to cheat by stuffing meta descriptions with keywords rather than useful information.
Many web apps still use the meta tags on websites. Some take them at face value while others filter or alter them. Just look at your bookmarks in Mozilla Firefox for an example of raw meta tags. I’ve also found that submissions get listed much faster in Internet directories such as DMOZ if the meta descriptions actually describe the contents of the sites.
October 12th, 2007 at 11:15 am
What strikes me as absolute hilarity is the fact that so many self-proclaimed SEO experts only know of the title, meta and linking a SEO strategies, and usually don’t even “understand” why and how to make use of these. And yet - these things are like the bare bones minimum things to look at. For a site to miss out on even the most basic Meta tags does not only address SEO issues, but also just plain poor development practice as well.
October 13th, 2007 at 2:39 am
[...] For another example, check out how one fan site creator put the heat on CBS for the way the network’s ‘Survivor: China’ show appears in Google. This blog post talks about how the CBS page is so poorly optimized that it fails to have a description tag to tell web searchers what the page is about. If the big boys at CBS aren’t up to speed on SEO, imagine the place where most online journalists are at. [...]
October 14th, 2007 at 4:48 pm
Great post, I am tired of so called “seo” experts talking down meta data…at the end of the day why not optimize it?