How important is a meta description to search engine placement?
June 9th, 2008Here’s another Monday morning softball lob SEO question: How important is the ‘meta description’ tag in getting your pages indexed and ranked in major search engines? This time the answer rhymes with scary 
Instead of leading with our test results, let me first give you some anecdotal evidence of the importance of good meta description tags. In my rush to create new pages I (sometimes) forget to add meta description to my pages - good descriptions, anyway. Invariably the new pages are slow to get picked up and indexed (if at all) and only when I go back and add in UNIQUE meta descriptions are the pages indexed by Google and others.
After launching our blog on singletracks.com in early 2007 we found that our blog posts weren’t being listed as unique pages by the search engines - only the blog homepage was being picked up. It turns out the Word Press software we were using didn’t create unique meta descriptions for individual blog post pages so we fixed that by excerpting the first sentence or two and using that for the page description. Within a week or two we found our blog page listings had multiplied. Easy fix, big result.
Now, to our test results: The test page we created without a meta description is ranked in Google above our page with the description included. I know, I know, I said this would be a softball question - so why the crazy result? Honestly I’m not entirely sure what’s going on but I do have a theory. Our test pitted two pages, each with our target keyword written 6 times in the body of the page at similar keyword densities. One page had the keyword in the meta description two times (once per sentence) while the other page did not include a meta description tag at all. As you probably already know Google prefers to use the meta description as the document summary but when one doesn’t exist it attempts to create its own summary based on the actual page content. Since our page content contains the target keyword 6 times (3 times in the first paragraph alone) it ranks above the page whose meta description (or, document summary) contains the keyword just twice.
Strangely Yahoo! agrees and prefers the meta-descriptionless page as well. Our keyword page without the meta description was not listed by Yahoo! at all.
So what does this mean? I certainly don’t recommend skipping meta description tags on your pages based on my own experience but I do think this test proves an important point. Optimizing your pages for keywords doesn’t stop at the page content and internet marketers should carefully construct meta description tags to include target keywords as often as possible. Our test was performed in a vacuum of sorts but in the real world your competitors will be optimizing both their content and meta tags - don’t be left behind!
