Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Check Your Meta Description Tags
I had an unpleasant surprise lately. A couple of my most popular and productive pages have been strangely silent so far in February. Traffic way down, referrals way down.

I checked to see if my search rankings for those pages had dropped. Nope. They were as strong as ever. But looking at how the search results listed those pages gave me my answer.

Google had switched the way they were presenting my results and were going strictly by the meta description instead of pulling the phrase most relevant to the keyword off the actual page. And I discovered that those particular meta descriptions - ahem - stank.

One was an extremely bland and generic description that I had written in a hurry when I was first trying to get as many pages up as I could. The other was too long and was being cut off in a weird way so that it made no sense.

In short, for lack of a compelling meta description, searchers were passing over my pages that many other searchers had previously found to be just what they were looking for. I've since corrected the problem and instituted a search of all my other pages for similar weak meta descriptions. It'll take a couple of days, though, before Google's results start to show the new descriptions.

It goes to show that although many meta tags are perfectly useless in terms of the search engines nowadays, you still need to be careful that your meta descriptions are sharp and compelling. Otherwise you can lose a lot of traffic, like I did.
Jeff