Are your snippets too good to get clicks?

24Jul08

The meta description of your websites is very important for the click through rate to your site. Ranking alone is not enough to make people choose you instead of the other nine frontpage ranked websites. You need to write an excellent copy to attract clicks.

But that short copy snipped should not be too good at the same time. Don’t tell your visitor all the information they looking for. They might not need to come to your site at all. I think this is an aspect often overseen.

Here are two examples, a good and a bad one.

The Good: There are many great translation websites with a very huge database of word pairs. Sometimes there’s only one meaning of the word you need to be translated. It would easily fit into the snipped. Instead of doing this, your could better advertise yourseld and some extras like a free translation software.

The Bad: To stay with the same example, here is a very bad snippet design. So “elevator” means “Fahrstuhl”, “Lift” or “Aufzug” in German? Okay, thanks, bye. Why should i click on the link to find the same information, together with probably lots of ads? They are ranking number one for my sample search, but the CTR must be horrible.

Here is another example of bad idea snippet design. Lets pretend your are looking for some funny flash games. An effective way to look for ‘free’ software is to use “keyword rapidshare” in Google Blogsearch. All you wanna find here are rapidshare links to download the game. Lets say we are loking for “Apple Pie rapidshare“, so we will see these Blogsearch SERPs. At least for e the second result is very neat. I found the Link already inside the snippet. That safes me time to find it on the page.

Of course this is a Blogspot blog, and as far as i know you can not define the description metatag. Maybe most people would not copy the url out of the text and paste it in the adress bar. But i think you can see my point in this example.

So make your site description very atractive to the visitor. You have to see it ike a small advertisement. Tell them than they find something special or free stuff on your site. But don’t give away they key information they are looking for. They will have no reason to come to your site anymore.

Bait your visitors, but keep them hungry.

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