My Lesson In Meta Descriptions

I’m bummed.

I know the importance of meta descriptions within SEO but I’d look like a hypocrite if I said I know SEO without a good meta description for my very own site. If you searched for me and this site came up, you likely saw:

john wiehe search result
johnwiehe.com Search Result

I want you to see:

John Wiehe Meta Description
WordPress SEO Meta Description

Meta descriptions are those few sentences underneath a URL in a page you’ve just searched for. They’re like breadcrumbs leading up to the site you want to go to yet I can’t even make my own work!!! (Exaggerated exclamation points made in anger.)

Matt Cutts to the rescue.

Maybe I haven’t made a big enough pothole in the information superhighway for Google or Bing to put in what I want my meta description to be. It’s frustrating but I’m relieved to see it here:

Source Code
johnwiehe.com Source Code

I hope search engines put it in their result pages one of these days as well.

Thanks for reading,
John

PS. If you read this post and know how to fix my problem involving meta descriptions, don’t be a stranger and please let me know.

About John Wiehe

Start-up SEO. Mizzou J-school grad. Eagle Scout. Learn more about me at Google+, +John Wiehe.
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2 Responses to My Lesson In Meta Descriptions

  1. Glen says:

    John my man,

    If you have changed it in your code in the correct place the search engines should pick it up the next time they crawl your site. It might be anywhere from two days to three weeks before you see the change.

    Also, if you want to do sample SERP snippets try this tool here:
    http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

    we use it all the time to make a mock up of what changes to the title tag/meta description will look like when implemented.

    • John says:

      Glen £££,

      Thanks for the link. I forgot to mention my hopes of search engines may pick my meta description and then like when it crawls it.

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