Meta Description Tags, SEO Campaigns, TechMeme & Fun Stuff

How to write a good Meta Description Tag

Webmasters got a refresher course in writing quality Meta Description tags thanks to a recent post over at the Google Webmaster Central blog. Raj Krishman explained how to improve the quality of your snippet – the short line of text displayed with each Web result – and give your site a quick Meta Description makeover. Fun, right?

Okay, maybe it’s not so fun but it is important. The strength and accuracy of your Meta Description tag is key because many times users will be basing whether or not they’re going to visit your site based on the text displayed for that page in the SERP. A Meta Description tag that doesn’t say anything about the page is going to leave users confused and heading to your competitors instead.

Raj explained that the Meta Description is designed to do three things: differentiate the descriptions for different pages, include clearly tagged facts in the description, and accurately describe what that page is about.

What’s Missing In Your Search Engine Optimization Campaign?

While we’re talking about improving your site, I really want to give a mention to a post I’ve been meaning to comment on but just haven’t had the time (in totally unrelated news, the SEO Newsletter comes out today! With an article written by Jim Sterne. Huzzah!). What post am I talking about? That would be Donna at SEO Scoop’s What Is Missing In Your SEO Campaign?

Donna writes:

"Look around your site. Now look around your competitors’ sites. What’s missing? I’d bet something is missing. What topic hasn’t been explored, explained, or expounded upon? Which user question has never been answered? What diagram has never been drawn? What podcast has never been heard? What screencast has never been shared?"

This is such excellent, excellent advice that I would encourage all of you to go do it right now. Please? Go take a look at your site. Find that article or blog entry or piece of site content that you thought you wrote but never got around to it and write it. Stop by your competitor’s place and see what they’re doing that you can do even better. Take a second to connect with your users and see what they want from you. Find the areas of your site that need improvement and go fix them. Consider it a little Fall cleaning, if you will.

TechMeme’s New Leaderboard

Because the space just isn’t competitive enough, TechMeme went ahead and launched its own Leaderboard, which shows the top 100 news sources, ranked by the number of headlines attributed to that blog on TechMeme over the previous thirty days. To make things more cutthroat, discussion links aren’t even counted, just full headlines. So basically it’s designed to help bloggers either get even bigger heads or feel worse about themselves. Sweet!

I shouldn’t even say bloggers because though TechMeme largely tracks the blogosphere’s tech-related conversation, there aren’t all that many bloggers listed. It’s mostly traditional news site and larger news organizations. That’s kind of a bummer. TechMeme should be about the bloggers.

What do you think? Do we really need another one of these? Will you use it? Personally, unless something crazy happens, this will probably the last time I even think about it. Who has time to worry about who the Top 10 or Top 100 voices are? No one actually participating in the conversation, that’s for sure.

Fun Finds

Silicon Alley Insider reports that eBay is finally admitting that it went after Skype and failed. Poor guys.

Performancing wants to know how you deal with stupid people online.

TechCrunch says Facebook will soon launch Friend Grouping. This will be quite handy for setting group-specific privacy settings, but just a little sad when I realize 190 of my 200 friends are SEO-based.

Liz Strauss pens the 7 Payoffs of Making Your Blogging Relationships Suck. Hee.

Lisa Barone is a writer, content marketer & VP of strategy at Overit Media. She's also a very active Twitterer, much to the dismay of the rest of the world.

See Lisa's author page for links to connect on social media.