New Study Recognizes The Importance Of The Meta Description Tag

They say sometimes in life it’s all about the smaller things.  According to a new study that analyzes search behavior, the same might be said for SEO as well.  The eye tracking study, performed by Mari-Carmen Marcos and Cristina González-Caro of Pompeu Fabra University, focused on user behavior in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) and how the user’s intent changes the interaction.  Given four different types of search queries to complete (informational, navigational, transactional and multimedia) the study then tracks what the user consumes on the SERP.  What was found was users spent a majority of their time looking at the snippit of the web result over any other component.  The chart below summarizes these findings.

Most times the snippit in a SERP is pulled from the meta description tag of the page when present.  This means the often-overlooked meta description tag has the potential to increase the click through rate of a website’s organic listings in search engines.  While this may not be a startling revelation to some SEO’s, the importance of this tag is too often dismissed by some.  This is likely due to the fact it is widely considered search algorithms to not equate meta descriptions into their rankings.  What this study has validated is that a compelling and informative description tag can drive more traffic to your site by enticing the user to click.  Since click through rates are thought to be a component of search engine algorithms, in a roundabout way the description tag might actually improve your site’s rankings.  An interesting next step for this study would be to analyze when the snippit uses the same keyphrase as the query how does that increase the click through rate?  How does it impact the user’s engagement with the snippit?  The study is translated in English and summarized at Dynamical.biz.