Years ago we said goodbye to the keyworks. Much has been said about this. Also of the need to use or not to use the robot.txt.
It is true that when you develop an SEO project it is very important to define the keywords that are needed to promote an online business, but those old tags that were introduced in the code in this way no longer work:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword1, keyword2, keyword3“>
What Google really values is the content of your page and that you mention those keywords in the body of your articles and internal pages.
Can we say goodbye to meta descriptions?
Now something similar happens with meta-descriptions. For years, web developers have used this code to provide an internal description to Google and for the search engine to understand what is shown on this website.
<meta name=”description” content=”This is an example. This will often show up in search results.“>
At Eblana Solutions we are always investigating to be up to date. As you know, Google changes its search algorithm very frequently. The algorithm that Google is using today is not the same as it was 2 weeks ago.
Optimizing with keywords from this HTML element, in theory, we will improve the click through rate of our search results.
The ratio of clicks per impressions would improve since when our meta description contains the keywords that the user is looking for, Google will highlight them in bold and this gives more visibility to our result.
An example:
As we see in the image, the search engine highlights the letters with the use of bold.
But, in reality, this is not true today … the result you have seen is not the original meta description that contains that url.
If we look at the code on this page, we can see this description.
<meta name = “description” content = “Discover All guitar Ads in All Sections For Sale on DoneDeal. Buy & Sell on Ireland’s Largest All Sections Marketplace.“>
Google analyzes the existing meta description in the HTML, analyzes the content of the web text and rewrites the meta description dynamically to suit the user’s search.
Does it make sense to spend time and resources optimizing meta descriptions?
Based on Michal Pecánek’s report from September 2020, we can draw these conclusions:
- 25% of the top ranking pages do not have a meta description.
- Google rewrites meta descriptions 62% of the time.
- The longer the meta description is, the more likely Google will rewrite the meta description.
It may be a bit confusing, but the meta description is indeed very important, although we must know this new operation of Google to adapt our content and our meta description to the new dynamic descriptions that Google generates.
Of course, if Google is able to “read and select” excerpts and use them at will, we cannot afford not to have this information, these keywords, on our pages. I would even go further and tell you that the use of synonyms can make a competitive difference compared to our competitors.
