The Importance of Meta Descriptions

By Adam  |  24 Oct 2016 12:00:00

A meta description is the small piece of text that can be found under any listing that comes up on a search engine. So, you'll have the title of a site and then after that you'll have about 150 characters on what you'll find there. Do you ever search for your own site to see what your meta descriptions look like? Or even to check that you have them at all? If not, you really should! Today I am going to talk about the importance of meta descriptions.

Some sites are made in such a way that they will automatically take the start of the page's content and use it as a meta description, other sites are made so that they will display no meta description if you don't manually enter it into a dedicated field. Search engine algorithms will view pages without a meta description as a negative thing, so it would definitely be worth your time to check how it works on your eCommerce website. If you find that you don't have any meta descriptions, but there's an easy way for you to go and fill them in, you should definitely do that. If you go from not having any meta descriptions across the site, to having every page fully optimised with one, it's possible that you'll see an increase in your search rankings and even a boost in traffic and sales!

Small things like this all factor into a site's SEO and are worth looking into. Some sites rank more lowly than they could do otherwise because people are failing to do small things that they don't realise will have any effect. From the point of view of the creators of the algorithm, they want sites to have meta descriptions because they want users of the search engine to know exactly what they're getting when they click on a link. If they don't have a meta description there's an increased chance that a customer will be unhappy with their result. Hopefully this can help you to do better with your eCommerce website, but whatever you do, I wish you continued success!