Web Designing , Site Development & E-Commerce

How to prepare search-engine friendly Meta description tag

What is Meta Description Tag?

Meta description is one of the most important elements for search engine listing. It offers a short idea of what the entire webpage page is all about. Search engine robots gather information from the description and display the same in the search engine result pages. Since the description acts as a window to the webpage, it is really important to stick to the established search engine guidelines for preparing the Meta description tag. As a matter fact, not all search engine use meta description tag as a basis to collect information for the search query, a major portion of search engines rely on the meta description tag and the web matter to evaluate the relevance of the description with the webpage and the search query as well. Hence, it is vital that all the targeted keywords and keyword phrases must be included in the Meta Description Tag.

What does it look like?


If you go to the view source of a webpage, a Meta description tag would look as the following:
<META name="description" content="Miami Florists create beautiful floral bouquets, arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions, including weddings, Valentines Day, parties and corporate events. Deliveries throughout Florida.">

How to make a Meta description tag

Let’s assume that we have assigned our targeted keywords to the page we are now ready to write the description for. However, there are certain limitations that you must be keeping in mind while optimizing the Meta description for the webpage. To begin with, most search engine would allow you to keep the description as long as you can; however, they won’t show the entire description in the SERPs. Neither will they index the entire description if it exceeds the character limit set by them. Ideally, most search engines will permit the character limit to be from 200 to 250. Therefore, you have to ensure that you use the targeted keywords within character limit to maintain a proper keyword density and increase the relevancy factor of the description as well.

Suppose the list of keywords that we have includes florists Miami, florists Florida, and wedding bouquets. There are two important things to be done while using these keywords in your description. First, you have to write a description that must grammatically make sense to the visitors and secondly, it must be conveying the essential message about the webpage you are going to write the description on. Additionally, it must also be enticing enough for the visitors so that they will be tempted to click on the link.

Let’s take a look at the possible description that we can make out of using the above keywords:

If you're seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions.
Although, this description satisfies the character limit and includes all the three targeted keywords, it, however, looks too bland and uninviting. We can also ways use some more characters to increase its length a bit more and make it look a bit more captivating.
For example,

Order online for a 10 percent discount!
So, now we have got the following description:

<META name="description" content="If you're seeking a florist in Miami Florida, Funky Florists create unforgettable wedding bouquets, floral arrangements, tributes and displays for all occasions. Order online for a 10 percent discount!">

So, the above Meta description tag has all the necessary components of ideal description such as:

• It is about 200-character long.
• It has all the targeted keywords in it, and
• It aptly describes the page it has been written on.

 

Let's Play- The Google Sandbox beckons

The sandbox can be defined as a virtual space where your website lies on a temporary hold or trial for some time before it get a good ranking in the search engine results pages. One thing to keep in mind is that though new websites get a good ranking and visibility in Google’s SERPS for a couple of weeks after being indexed by Google, this does not last. Instead, their ranking starts touching lows after this starting period is over in spite of having original and optimized matter and also having genuine inbound links to one’s website.

Stated more simply, the sandbox acts as a filter which lists your website but does not rank it well for the starting few months. Since almost all new websites are sandboxed, experts do give us some warnings. They say that the more usage of competitive keywords on your site, the more the probability that your website will be sandboxed for a longer duration. Another thing to remember is that a sandboxed site is indexed by Google but is not well ranked for keyword phrases.

Watch out!

Not only are new websites sandboxed, even well established sites that gets various links from other websites all at once are also likely to experience sandboxed. The reason why this is done is because Google discovered that spammers actually divide a single site into fragments so that they can facilitate the exchange of links. Thus, they also make new websites deigned with the intention of giving valuable links to the other websites.

So, what is the need for a sandbox?

Google felt that a website filter was an important need so that they could keep search engine spammers away. How did they realize this? Actually search engine spammers were able to crack Google’s algorithm and started using it for their own benefit. Spammers made websites that were not up to Google’s standards but, still managed to get top listing. This was because of the usage of keywords, inbound links and use of anchor text.
Even though Google would discover these websites and ban them, it was still conducive for the spammers. Even though they got the top ranking of Google for a short time, the visiting traffic to their websites during this time more than compensated the spammers for the cost of building these sites in the first place. We require to remember that Google never admits the sandbox exists, but webmasters confirm that new websites new definitely sandboxed for the starting months.

Escaping the sandbox

No matter how much one wants to find a solution, the only way to get out of the sandbox is to wait for the probation period to end. However, one can use this time constructively by making better one’s website so that it works for one’s benefit. One way to so is by including matter that is rare and increasing the number of affiliations through inbound links to your website. Stop aiming on search engine traffic only and work on other aspects that exist.

So, am I in the Sandbox?

One can know this through the simple course of elimination. Firstly, you need to ensure that you get rid of the possibility that Google will ban your website. If this is done and your ranking with Google is still low, then you need to ensure that the possibility of being sandboxed because of high usage of competitive words is also eliminated. If in spite of all precautions, your ranking remains low then the chances are that you have been sandboxed. Also, if other search engines rank your website well and you don’t get a good ranking with Google, again it would confirm that you may be sandboxed. So, play the game and win.

The course of search engine optimization basically revolves around three important factors - code, matter and incoming links. These are three different pieces of the SEO puzzle; if any one of them is missing then your organic SEO effort might not earn you as much success as you plan to get. More importantly, the search engine results of your website will take a sever beating which in turn will affect the volume of traffic to your website. Hence, knowing the nitty-gritty of each one of these factors helps. However, we are going to talk only about the link building that is serious to the organic search engine ranking course.

Link building is a course of getting incoming or inbound links to your website. It plays a great role in deciding the link popularity of your web sites to rank higher in the SERP of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN. In fact, links are taken as a major variable by all search engines while deciding the algorithms among all the other factors. Let’s take a look at the incoming link variables that search engine algorithms consider seriously. Let’s take a look:

Number of Links

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask consider the incoming or inbound links to a great extent. Hence, when it comes to the volume of incoming links, the more the merrier. Generally, inbound links are the links that you get from other sites pointing toward your site. Each link is considered as a vote of support that your site wins from other sites. Typically, Google has a Page Rank tool that which take the number of links to your WebPages for assigning a particular Page Rank to the WebPages of your website. Therefore, it is important to have a lot of incoming links so that your WebPages win a great deal of credibility among the search engines.
Quality/Origin of the Links

Links are important parts of organic search engine ranking; however, among all the links that your site gets may not have the same degree of quality. Search engines consider the quality of the links while deciding the link popularity of any website. Generally, sites that have higher volume of quality links tend to get better search engine positioning that others.

Relevancy of the Links

Quality of incoming links and relevancy of the links are intertwined and serious components of organic search engine optimization. Relevancy factor is the crux of the link popularity mechanism and search engines gauge this factor explicitly. Ideally, if your site has got some of the inbound links from other relevant sites especially, relevant pages, they carry more weight age than the ones that don’t. Relevancy primarily is decided on the basis of the similarity of theme of two website. For instance, if two websites are related to online dating and have inbound links from each other from the pages that are optimized on similar keywords or keyword phrases, they those inbound links carry a very good weight age and search engine algorithms will treat them as quality incoming links.

Anchor Text within the Links

Quality of inbound links is also decided on the basis of the Anchor Text of the incoming links. Basically, the anchor text of your incoming links must be optimized in such a way that search engines would know that they are extremely relevant to the pages they are linked to. Search engines emphasize on this factor taking into the visitors into consideration. For instance, if your anchor text is misleading or doesn’t properly explain its relevancy with the pages it is linked with, it will lose its value significantly even when it scores high on the relevancy scale. Hence, optimization of anchor text must be one of the most important considerations for ranking high in the organic search engine optimization.