Making meta data 'descriptions' more visible

We've recently made an update to the way meta data is published by the CMS which makes entering good meta data for University web pages much more worthwhile.

Getting people to enter good meta data into pages can be a losing battle, but hopefully I'll persuade you that it's worthwhile! I'm as bad as anyone at forgetting to do it, so I'm going to try to take my own advice too :)

Meta descriptions in search results

The change we've made means the University's internal search engine will now use the description field as the default text in search result snippets if it exists. External Google will also use the data, though it's a little less predictable (it tries to judge whether your description is 'good' or not, which is pretty subjective).

This increased visibility of descriptions leads to two recommendations:

1. If you don't have meta data in your pages, you really should add some
2. If you do have meta data in your pages, it's worth making sure it's informative and well written

Writing good meta descriptions

Google provide plenty of information about how to write good meta descriptions (see the latter section of that page, but while you're there you should read the top section about titles too!) and sites such as SEOmoz have good coverage too.

The key is to be descriptive: Tell someone enough about what's on the page to help them decide whether that's the page they should look at or not. Don't just state the obvious - saying 'Department of XYZ homepage' tells users that it's your homepage, but nothing else. 'The top XYZ department for student satisfaction in the UK. Discover more about our undergraduate and postgraduate courses plus world-leading research.' is more much more informative.

How long should a description be?

We recommend between 100 and 150 characters.

Google displays between 150 and 160 characters, so going over that risks your description being truncated.

At the other end of the spectrum though, if your description is particularly short Google may supplement it with content pulled from the page. This has happened with our maps page:

The first line in the snippet is our 'description'; the second is pulled from page content

Since you can probably write a better description of your page content than Google can automatically generate, it's worth providing enough content to stop it deciding to supplement what you provide.

Adding descriptions in the CMS

In addition to making meta descriptions more useful when published, we've made it easier to add them in the CMS too.

Meta data is added in the same place as always - the 'Meta' tab in the Modify Section screen - but we've removed all the other fields apart from description and keywords so it's much easier to get straight to the correct field to fill in. Any Moderator can add or amend meta data fields and there's no approval needed of any changes; they'll go live with the next publish automatically.

Seeing the effects

Search engines take a while to re-index pages, so if you change your meta descriptions don't expect search results to update instantly. Give it a few days, maybe up to a couple of weeks, and you should see the effect of your change.

Happy meta data updating!