Descriptions vital to search engine visitors
By: Jonathan Briggs
April 10, 2006
Netimperative reports an interesting survey of UK search engine users, Brits regularly use more than one search engine- survey. This reveals that most users switched their searches between a variety of engines.
One other finding that is useful to search engine marketers and companies was the finding that a third of web searchers say that "the most important factor in selecting the result to click on is that the description looks most like what I am looking for".
Descriptions are picked up by the search engine spiders either from the text on the page or from the META tags added to the page when it is created.
Controlling these descriptions could therefore make a difference to whether a link is clicked or not and site designers should think carefully about how they can encourage relevant clicks.
Interestingly there are many sites that still either omit META tag descriptions all together or have a standard description throughout the site. These sites could be missing out on additional targeted traffic from search engines.
Our content management system, OTHERobjects CMS, has recently been extended to allow full control of individual page META tags. We are experimenting with encouraging our clients to use specific "selling" descriptions on each of their pages.
Adding individual descriptions to every page is of course an extra overhead when managing page or ecommerce comment but this survey suggests that the investment could be very worthwhile.