SEO Speedwagon

On the heels of Google noting the importance of a strong meta description, I felt compelled to remind you that while I agree with that in theory for most sites, not all Google properties are using it the way publishers would like. Old media is a big enough ship to turn around, and it has finally swung around to see that search is important (see John's post about Times Select), so while they're feeling nimble, I want to offer them some additional advice on click-throughs from news sites such as Google News.

Descriptive snippets on news sites have a tough job. Newspapers need their descriptions to be the "hook" that entices readers like me to click through. They need to be written to fully reside in the confined character quarters that news SERPs allow them. They need to short enough to tease and convince me that I won't get the full story by skimming headlines, but they need to be long enough that I believe THIS SPECIFIC SITE has the full story.

But the problem is that Google News doesn't consistently pull descriptive data from the meta description. Instead, it tends to pull characters from the byline, wire data (if applicable), graphics captions (if applicable), and the first paragraph of the story.

Take the Houston Chronicle as a site that just doesn't get it. In looking through my customized home page of Google News, the algo determined I might be interested in the articles shown here:

The Chronicle messes up because the first text the engine sees after the author's byline is the error text belched out by the Flash sniffer. Not exactly your article's best foot forward.

In a situation like this (an algo-generated list of stories I might like), the Chronicle has the only article about Franchione (the Texas A&M football coach). So the headline itself might be enough to convince me to click through. But if I'd searched Google News for [Franchione], the Chronicle's article would be one of many, and due to the lack of description, my click would almost certainly go elsewhere.

So what's a poor paper to do, beyond making sure its no-Flash error text gets buried out of the way? Is the rest of the article set up to give your description maximum exposure? Take a look at the following headlines and descriptions and see who really gets it:

In the shot above, the green text is descriptive text about the story itself, while the yellow text is author/byline/wire information. The LA Times gets it because they bury the byline AFTER the story's lede, as shown in the shot at the left. Only the Times gets its WHOLE abstract on the SERP. The other papers' abstracts get cut off because they lead with author bylines. On the actual article page (shown at left), notice how the Times' placement of the intro paragraph followed by the byline is mirrored on the actual Google News SERP above.

Unless your story's author IS PART OF the story itself or is part of the brand (think Dowd, Ebert, Buckley, etc.), you'll need to experiment to ensure that your byline doesn't distract readers and keep them from getting the full benefit of the description you've written. Test, test, test, and make sure your readers get the most tempting view of the story you can manage.