Meta Descriptions and Elevator Speeches

If you are like me, you woke up thinking about meta tags role in SEO. Probably not, but I had a meeting with a guy last night and he had 1999 understanding of the web, and he proceeded to question my statement, “Meta Tags don’t matter anymore.”

If you keep up with SEO, you probably will tend to agree with that statement, but meta descriptions, on the other hand, still have a role in search results. I like to think of the meta description as the elevator speech of the page. Why is the page here? What is the page about in a very short succinct sentence? How is it going to benefit the reader?

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Insert Elevator Speech here.”>

Meta descriptions, you probably know, are generally used for the page description first when displaying search results.  If you don’t have a meta description, the search engine will likely take some text that is cached from the page. Be creative, but be accurate because the browser is making split second decsions.  Just like your elevator pitch of a new idea, set the hook and beg the click.


Jeremy Floyd

Jeremy Floyd is the President at FUNYL Commerce. Formerly, he was the CEO and President of Lirio, Bluegill Creative, a marketing and communications firm in Knoxville, Tennessee. In addition to managing the digital strategies, Floyd was an adjunct professor for the University of Tennessee Chattanooga MBA program teaching digital strategies and social media. Floyd blogs at jeremyfloyd.com and tweets under the name @jfloyd. Jeremy is licensed to practice law in the State of Tennessee and holds a law degree from the University of Tennessee College of Law and a Bachelor of Arts degree from MTSU in English and Philosophy.