Posted on August 13th, 2009 by
Welly in
Internet Marketing,
Marketing,
SEO
I’m sure by now you’re already aware of how “meta tags” such as “meta description” or “meta title” or “meta keywords” play roles in optimizing your web pages in search engines like Google.
Everywhere you go in the forums or blogs, there seems to be a lot of discussions on search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
It is very common to see or hear from these sources that to rank well in the search engines (especially Google in particular), you need to have as many 1 way incoming links that point to your web page that have the targeted keywords as the anchor text of the links.
Apart from incoming links, you most likely also learned from these sources that you need to have your targeted keywords in the title tag of your web page.
Then you also need to have your targeted keywords in the “meta keywords tag”.
The One IMPORTANT Aspect That Is Neglected
While all of this is true, there is one important aspect about SEO techniques that is truly neglected.
I’m talking about human behaviors and their/our interactions with how everything is connected.
If you think deeply enough, you’d realize that everything we as marketers or business owners are doing, be it generating traffic using SEO techniques, capturing visitors’ contact info to turn them into leads, and then following up with them to convert them into customers – everything that we are doing at each step of the process involves human interaction.
Even though you could argue that you’re using automated systems to drive traffic and utilizing autoresponders to follow up with your prospects and therefore involve no human interaction on your part, in the end, you still have to interact with your prospects regardless of the method of interaction.
Autoresponder is just a means of communicating with them (your prospects) to ensure that they are in the right hands and that they should trust you. For all you want, you can also follow up via phone or snail mail. That would be A LOT more expensive and time-consuming though. However, that is not what this discussion is about.
The underlying point I’m trying to convey here is that your leads/prospects are still HUMAN BEINGS who need to be treated as HUMANS. This shouldn’t be any different when it comes to optimizing your web pages for search engines.
After all, it is humans who are searching for information using search engines. It is humans that will eventually visit our web page and read/listen/watch what we have to say. It is humans who will finally buy our products and give us their money.
The Search Process
A user who is searching for information using search engines typically follows this process:
1. User types a relevant keyword to whatever he is searching for in Google.
2. Search results are returned and he performs one of the following actions:
A)
He may or may not click the first web page returned (even though there is a high possibility that he is going to click it since it is the first result and humans read from top to bottom)
OR
B)
Instead of clicking the first result, he scans through the first 10 web pages that are returned and he chooses one that is the most relevant to whatever he is searching for (based on what he sees).
For example, take a look at the top 4 Google results below for a particular keyword phrase:
If you were searching for information on how to make money online, and you’re scanning through quickly to decide which one to click, which one would you choose?
Narcissism reasons aside, I’d most likely click the 2nd result first (which happens to be my blog you’re reading right now). I’m sure you’d click the 2nd result first as well.
Why?
Because the description says “The Beginners FREE Place To Learn How To Make Money Online”, which is what I’m looking for PLUS it’s FREE to learn PLUS it definitely has more persuasive power in enticing me to click on it than the other 3 results. So I’d say to myself “Why not click this one first”.
This illustrates that it is possible that a person may choose to click the number 2nd,3rd or 4th result FIRST before clicking the first result.
This proves my point about the importance of catering to humans as well when you’re doing SEO to optimize your web page, because after all, it is humans who are going to read what you have to say. While the ranking of your web page in search results is important, so is the way of how you present/persuade humans to click your site.
Present What You Want Them To See
And the good news is there is a way to present whatever information you want people to see, just like the example above where I managed to put in the words “The Beginners FREE Place To Learn How To Make Money Online”.
I did that by using the “meta description tag”. Whatever I insert into this meta description tag will be shown right under the title of the web page:
The title of the web page (or meta title tag) is “Internet Business Make Money Online | Make Money On The Internet” (without quotes).
The meta description tag is “The Beginners FREE Place To Learn How To Make Money Online” (without quotes).
Summary
To summarize what we’ve covered in this post, we’ve learned that:
1. While catering to what search engines want for good search engine rankings is important, so is catering to humans. It is because of humans that search engines were created in the first place, to make searching for information easy and fast.
2. You can use the “meta tag description” to put in a persuasive description for your web page to describe what your site is about, so that you can entice people to click your site. When done correctly, you can outperform web pages that are ranking higher than you in the search engines.
Please post your comments/opinions about this “Meta Description Goes Here – What It Has Got To Do With Your CTR” post in a comment below. I’d like to hear what you have to say…
Everywhere you go, you hear people talking about how important SEO is for your business, as I’ve mentioned in this post.
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