Purpose

8 Feb 2008

The purpose of this experiment is to answer the following questions:

• How useful is the Meta-Description tag in SEM, today?
• Which search engines use the Meta-Description tag?
• How long does it take for search engines to display the content of the Meta-Description tag, instead of their own selection of text, in a search engine query?
• What role do keywords in the Meta-Description play?
• How does the meta description impact the page rank of the page it is used on?

Setup

8 Feb 2008

We will use the Identry home page for our first experiment. The starting situation was:

• No meta-description tag on the page
• Google displays a selection of text that contains the keywords searched for.

For example, when searching for "coin dealer websites", the description in the search engine results is:

"John Almberg's "Selling on the Web" newsletter focuses on website innovations and online marketing strategies for stamp, coin, and collectible dealers. ..."

And when "identry" is searched for, the description is:

"Identry has specialized in websites and online marketing for stamp, coin, ... Identry's goal is to provide our clients with all the pieces they need to ..." 

Note that Google highlights the keywords search for.

• Yahoo does something similar:

When "coin dealer websites" is searched, the description is:

Experiment Design

Here are the steps we took to set up this experiment:

• Add Meta-description tag to the home page
• Choose keywords to use
• Write description that uses those keywords
• Add to page
• Baseline the page for those keywords -- choose competitive and non-competitive keywords, with some that have low rankings
• Automate the process of checking ranking and description

Since the description is less than 30 words long, we could only optimize for a few keywords. We wanted to optimize for two competitive and two non-competitive keywords that we didn't rank too high for, so had a bit of room for improvement. The ones we chose were:

Based on these keywords, the description we chose was the following:

"Identry makes the Top Seller II turnkey, e-commerce system -- the best-selling website for coin dealers, stamp dealers, and collectible dealers."

We didn't have much hope that it would help, but we used the meta keyword tag for the alternate spellings of the keywords: 'topseller, web site, stamp dealer, coin dealer'

All these changes were made on 8 Feb 2008. We will post any changes to the search engine result description, and keyword rankings on a weekly basis for 4 weeks.

After 1 Week...

15 Feb 2008

At the end of the first week, I checked the keywords on Google, Yahoo, Ask, and MSN (the Big 4). Here are the results, so far:

• Google uses the meta-description as the search results description if and only if the description contains the keywords searched for.

When searching for 'coin dealers', the following result was displayed:

But when searching for 'John Almberg', the following was displayed:

• The others do not use it, at all (at least, thus far)
• There has been no clear impact on search engine ranking, thus far. In fact, the results are decidedly mixed, and probably have nothing to do with the change:

We'll check again, next week.