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22 January 2010
Posted in
S.E.O
Meta Descriptions. They used to be important to your page rankings, until Google and yahoo stopped using them as a factor in their search algorithms. But now they are coming back into play. But Google keep playing around with the searches so much that your Meta descriptions are now just as important, if not more. They haven’t re-included it in their algorithms but they have done something.
Google’s new customized search: they are now personalizing your search pages!
You may not like this or you may like it, but this means sites you visit a lot will be higher on your search pages. Used to be they could only do this when you were logged in to your Google account. Now everybody gets personalized results. You can click a button to turn that off if you want but the person searching is the only one that can do this.
What happens is, your browser stores things called cookies every time you search and visit sites, and this is vital to your new search experience. All these cookies are stored in your web history for 180 days and new data will continuously replace the old. You can also manage and delete parts or even all of this web history data, which can help you, choose to what extent this personalization affects you. Right so if there is a site that you visit often it is pushed much higher through the search rankings. Along the lines of going on a page a few times pushes it from 31st position all the way all the way to 5th.
Let’s say you went on www.onetwo.com, it at the bottom of the first page of unpersonalized results for the search term one, but on the 15th page of unpersonalized results for the search term two. If you go on the site a good few times a week then it will push the result for search term one to the top of the first page and the result for search term two will be about 5 pages further forward. If you use this site religiously like 5,6, maybe 7 times in a day for the last 180 days then chances are it will be right at the top of the first page for both search terms. So these personalized search engine results pages differ greatly from unchanged ones.
Now the way the Meta descriptions come into play is on peoples personalized search result pages, even though they have nothing to do with unpersonalized rankings. What the Meta descriptions now affect is your CTR (Click-Through Rate) within the search results. The more interesting, eye-catching the Meta description, the higher CTR your site gets and in turn the more people that see you closer to the top of their search results. This makes the potential extent of the Meta descriptions importance astoundingly large. There is tons of info out on the net on how to write a good Meta description and it’s a little much, seeing as its all advice, and it may or may not get you results so just try and keep it relevant, concise, clear and to the point.
Meanwhile Google has been taking an awful lot of stick for doing this. There have been S.E.O executives winging that it’s going to make their high income lives harder, what a shame. Some people have concerns about their privacy being disrupted, and others don’t like it as they think it will help the big companies get bigger and forever push out the smaller ones. That could happen but it could also do the opposite, or just not have much affect on it, if someone wants to use a newer, smaller, more personal company. It may not be the best of ideas with the economy being so brittle, but it may work, and it might only do 2 things; give Meta descriptions another reason to exist and allow search engine users to have a more personal experience, being able to get to what they want, just faster.
