Creating a Call to Action Meta Description and its Advantages

Meta descriptions are one of those on page SEO element which is not given due respect by most of the SEO professionals. Title tag, Meta Description tag and Meta Keywords tags are 3 of the most basic and important onpage SEO elements that is present on a website. Few years back, all these three elements held high importance infront of Google’s search algorithm and people started overly optimizing these elements in order to rank higher in search engine results pages.

Off late Goole’s algorithm has brought some sort of changes regarding the importance of these elements and as a results the Meta Keyword element almost lost its importance as an influential element in determining the search engine results. The Meta description element also lost some of its old charm and no more plays a huge influential role in ranking a website as it used to be few years back.

But still the Meta Description tags are being implemented by every SEO professionals, and they still they have some small amount of magic left for search engine ranking. Apart from this small ranking ability the Meta descriptions are clearly responsible for driving search engine traffic to a website. These days Meta Description tags are driving more traffic to any websites when compared with their performance few years back. But how?

The answer is quite simple as the Meta Descriptions with a strong call to action nature serves as a perfect ad copy in Google organic search results. If the Meta Descriptions are written in a marketing call to action style, then it is sure to convert a good percentage of search engine visitors into website visitors by prompting them to click on the search result. So a well written Meta Description will obviously result in a better click through rate and there by more traffic to any particular website.

These days just optimizing the Title tag will not get your search engine traffic, rather you need to create a call to action Meta description that clearly specifies your web page and at the same time asks the search engine visitor to click on the result for more details. The Meta description should be written in such a way that any visitor must normally try to click on the result link and know more about it on the webpage.

In a call to action Meta description you need to make sure that the description should reflect what the users are looking for and you also need to keep things short within a word count of around 250. If it is a product page it will be better if you can add the price range which will help in getting more clicks. For any other general page, adding a contact number and a geographical location will help you get more leads.

So a well written call to action Meta Description will
1) Get more clicks.
2) Get targeted visitors.
3) More potential / promising visitors.
4) Help to know about your page from the search result itself.
5) More leads and sales.

If you are not yet convinced, then just try and test your webpages with relevant and well written meta tags and see the difference.

Some Useful Meta Robots Tags

The Meta Robots tags are one of the most commonly used tags in a web page. The meta robots tags are used  to create page level instructions for different search engine bots. All these tags are placed on the head section of an HTML page. These tags can wisely be used for usual SEO activities.

Here I would like to list about 6 important and useful meta robots tags that you can use across your website for different purposes.
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Prevent Search Engines from Using Information from Open Directory Project (DMOZ)

The well known Open Directory project,  DMOZ is an open content directory of world wide web links. DMOZ is owned by Netscape and have a large community of volunteer editors who takes care and manage DMOZ. While displaying the snippets by Google, while performing a search, the content is taken either from the Meta description tag of the web page or from the description that is provided in the DMOZ. If Google doesn’t find the entry of that website in DMOZ, it also takes relevant content from the page content.

There are certain instances when a particular page on the website and the DMOZ description for that website does not match. i.e the DMOZ content is not relevant to a particular page on the website. In this case if the DMOZ description is provided for that particular page on Google search, the click through ratio may decrease due to the irrelevancy in the snippets provided. Here as a website owner, one has to make sure that for that particular page, the search engine does not display the snippets from DMOZ entry. So here one must make necessary steps to prevent the search engine from taking the description from DMOZ.

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