Tempt Googlers To Visit Your Site With Persuasive Text

When your customers search using Google they are greeted with a screen full of search results, all trying to secure their attention first. It can take hard work to get on that initial screen, although there are some short cuts as we hinted at in our last blog post ‘Why You Should Get On Google Local Search’ . So if you are featured on there it pays to make sure the message you put across is highly relevant and interesting to your potential customers. That’s where Meta Titles and description come in. This is how you tempt Googlers to visit your site – persuasive text. The real secret is even if you are not featuring on that golden first screen, setting Meta description and titles correctly can also help boost your Page rank.

Understanding Google’s Results Screen

OK – let’s have a look at the Google results so you can see properly what it is we’re talking about. Don’t worry about the detail for now just concentrate on the different parts of the results Google shows you.

First off a quick disclaimer- I’ve photoshopped these results a little bit to make it more clear – I’ve removed the local and maps results which would normally appear at the top of any search mentioning a local place name, and I’ve also taken out the ad results. This gives us a clear view of the ‘Organic’ results that we are interested in. The first thing you’ll notice is the large blue text that headlines each search result. This is the page title, or if described in the code within your header it can also be known as the ‘Meta Title’.  Next up in green is the actual URL of the webpage. Underneath here is the description text. So lets start off with the Page title.

Meta Title or Page Title

So in our example we can see that the first result on our list has just displayed their page title. This is probably because the meta Page Title tags have not been set for this page. This can be fine if your page title is good, but using a good bit of persuasive text here can be the difference between a customer paying a visit to your site and obscurity. The last result for printcolchester.co.uk shows a better description. This website has set their meta title carefully to not only display what the page is about, but also use some persuasive and tempting language to encourage the viewer to visit. The use of two major keywords within the title (print and Colchester) will also help with their Page rank for this search term.

Meta Description or Snippet

So the Meta description text is another piece of information you can post in the header section of your webpage.  It tells Google what to post on your search result as a description. In the example above you can see what happens when it is set for your webpage – look at the Printcolchester.co.uk result again and you’ll see a well considered short piece of text that describes what the website is about (in tempting language) and why you should visit them, all finished off with a neat Call to Action – ‘Order Today”. There is a caveat however – these descriptions will only show if the search term includes keywords that are within the description. The keywords will be highlighted in bold on the results.

The results at the top of the page shows what happens either if the meta description is not set, or the search term does not match keywords found in the meta description. Instead of the neat well considered description, Google constructs it’s own snippet using abridged text scraped from your page’s content. Again it will highlight the keywords in bold. Although this can give the searcher a good idea of what it is your page is about, it is usually better to be able to control this area with a well constructed description. That way you can use this area to write more persuasive and tempting copy, encouraging Googlers to visit your site.

Adding your Meta Titles and Descriptions.

Depending on how you constructed your website there are different methods of adding these Meta Titles and descriptions. If you already have a Webwalrus website, we can certainly help you out here, and will have considered these factors for you already. We can supply you with a list of your page titles and descriptions and if you want to change any of them let us know.

If you have your own website with full control over your code and wrote it yourself, the easiest way is to add the tags yourself to your pages within the <head> section. Google’s guidance on this technique can be viewed at this link: Review Your Page Title And Snippets.

Use Yoast For WordPress SEO

For those of you with self-hosted WordPress sites we’d certainly recommend the great WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast. These guys are genius at this stuff and their free plugin helps out in a thousand different ways, but one of the most useful is the capability of writing unique Meta Titles and descriptions for each page. Check out this blog page from Yoast for help with your page descriptions and download the plugin immediately!

A lot of our readers seem to be using Moonfruit to design their own website. Although this approach can be a little inflexible at times, it is possible to set your Metas there too, just follow the instructions at this link: How do I edit My Meta Tags on Moonfruit. That will walk you through the process.

What Should I Write In My Meta Title And Description?

I’ll go through the best things to write in your Page title and descriptions in another post soon, but in the meantime make sure you visit that post from Yoast I mentioned. In brief the key to it is to keep it the description short (maximum of 150 characters) and use natural language to describe your site’s page content, whilst including keywords that people might use to search for you. Finish it all off with a gentle call to action. The Meta title should include a good combination of your major keywords, along with some persuasive text. Some SEO experts recommend adding your website’s name at the end to reinforce the destination.

Just to round this off here is a great post from Ramsay over at BlogTyrant that can help you write effective page titles.

If you’ve got any questions on any of this let me know in the comments below and I’ll do my best to help out.

See you next time 😀

J