Structured Data + Meta Descriptions
-
Hey All,
Was just looking through some google pages on best practices for meta descriptions and came across this little tidbit.
"Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn't just have to be in sentence format; it's also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.
"
This is the first time I have seen suggested use of structured data in meta descriptions. Does this totally replace a regular meta description or will it work in conjunction with the regular meta description? If I provide both structured data and text, will the SERP display text and the structured data the way it was previously displayed? Or will the 150 -160 character limit take precedence and just cut off all info after that?
-
JStrong,
Just to make sure we're all on the same page: Although Google uses the phrase "Structured Data..." I don't think they mean it in the same was as you would use, for example, Schema markup in the code. The example there is simply a meta description, which you can use for whatever purpose you like. It could be worth testing the Click-Through-Rate on meta descriptions like that (a metric you can see in Google Webmaster Tools) to decide if you want to use it, though for my money I'd bet on a description with a clear value proposition, offer, call to action, emotion, etc... that will also have their keywords bolded if they appear in the description.
If you do test it out please share what the effect on CTR in the SERPs was from GWT. Just because I'm curious.
-
Very interesting! I don't recall seeing that before but I checked the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine entry for that URL and the quoted extract has been there since at least 2013.
Elsewhere Google has been pretty insistent on structured data being part of the document itself as much as possible so it does seem somewhat contradictory advice. As you say perhaps they've simply forgotten to update that particular entry to reflect current thinking.
-
Hi Alex,
Ah, so something older then? This is where I saw the information. I thought Google was usually pretty good about removing outdated information, but maybe not in this case. I agree, that I have previously only worked with and seen structured data in the body markup, so not sure if this was a more recent development or not.
Thanks for the input!
-
Once upon a time it was possibly a good use of the meta description to include some salient structured data but today we have a proper way of marking up structured data. The meta description is best used for compelling, relevant copy to attract the user to click through to your site as the meta description is your one best hope of affecting what is shown to the user in the SERPs.
Search engines haven't shown any inclination to parse the meta description and I doubt they would do so in future. Structured data belongs in the document itself, marked up accordingly.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Structuring sentences after keyword research
Hello, Once I have done your keyword research is there way to write other than "naturally" which is what everyone says ? Could someone explain what they mean by naturally. For example let's say my keyword is Piedmont bike tour, some of the words I find through my research are cycle, routes, piedmont, barolo, wine etc... Is there a way to integrate those so that google understands what I mean. I imagine that google parses sentences for s reason and imagine that if I only sprinkle those words like in the sentence below it won't work. Piedmont bike tour, cycle, routes, piedmont, barolo, wine all this is cool ! Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
How many images should I use in structured data for a product?
We have a basic printing website that offers business cards. Each type of business card has a few product images. Should we use structured data for all the images, or just the main image? What is your opinion about this? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
Sreaming Frog vs. Yoast - meta description clash
Hi all, I'm working on a site where when I crawl it with SF, SF doesn't pick up on the meta description (as in the source code it IS blank). However, the meta description has been set via the Yoast Wordpress plugin and it does exist in the source code and is shown in the SERPs. The code looks like this: <title>Dining Table and Chairs set</title> So my question is: will this be affecting SEO and how the website is ranking if all the actual are blank? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bee1591 -
Best Format to Index a Large Data Set
Hello Moz, I've been working on a piece of content that has 2 large data sets I have organized into a table that I would like indexed and want to know the best way to code the data for search engines while still providing a good visual experience for users. I actually created the piece 3 times and am deciding on which format to go with and I would love your professional opinions. 1. HTML5 - all the data is coded using tags and contains all the data on page in the . This is the most straight forward method and I know this will get indexed; however, it is also the ugliest looking table and least functional. 2. Java - I used google charts and loaded all the data into a
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jwalker880 -
Capitalization of first letter of each word in meta description. Catches more attention, but may this lead to google ignoring the meta description then more frequently?
Capitalization of first letter of each word in meta description. Catches more attention, but may this lead to google ignoring the meta description then more frequently? Same for an occasional capitalized FREE in meta description. Anybody had experience with this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse1 -
Process for moving existing articles to new structure (URLs, titles, etc)
I am in the midst of a major redesign of my site, including revamping existing articles . I have a couple of hundred articles and I am reviewing all aspects of these articles, including titles, URLs, content, etc. I am putting together a process as I move each article across to the new site and have SEO very much in mind. I'd appreciate any feedback on this. First off, let me be clear that I consider the quality of the content paramount. Anything suggested below is considered "supporting" (that content) from an SEO perspective. But, since I am moving this content across, I may as well take the opportunity to clean things up. The existing articles don't have particularly good SEO-related attributes, in terms of their titles, URLs, use of keywords and so on. So, I plan to do the following for each article. For illustrative purposes (our site serves the wedding industry), I will use an article about how to involve children at a wedding. Questionsunder each bullet. Use the "Keyword Difficulty" feature on Moz Pro to research a specific keyword for each article. In the example case I used "involving children in our wedding". Honestly, I am not really sure what to do with this feature 🙂 I've read everything from "focus on the long tail" to "don't fear highly competitive keywords". So, my current thinking is merely to use it as interesting information for they keyword I choose but not actually make any specific decisions from that ie. make sure the keyword is relevant to the article as the first priority and use the tool to check out search volume. Not sure what I should read into a zero for recent Bing searches. Is that really an important factor? I'm assuming the Google information is not available from Google (it would be displayed here otherwise, I'm guessing) Use a title that uses these keywords. In this case, I simply went with "Involving children in our wedding". Same for URL - /wedding-guests/involving-children-in-our-wedding If I have a reasonable, short and human-friendly term like this (I can do this with virtually every article quite easily), is there any reason why the URL and the title should not be the same? In short, the title and URL are both a relatively concise "mini-sentence" Make sure the meta description of the article is easy-to-read (for humans) and uses the keyword (sentence) Make sure that the theme (we are moving to WordPress) uses H1 for the page header/title and H2 for sections within the document Implement 301 redirects from the old URL (old site) to the new URL This seems like a pretty obvious approach for articles where the URL has changed (which will be most of them). But what do I do with articles that I am going to remove. Should I redirect (301) to a related article (so at least the visitor ends up on a page that is generally relevant) or just let this "fall through" as a non-existent page (401)? As I say, I have 200+ articles to go through I want to make sure I am taking this advantage to clean things up. Anything leaping out as missing/problematic? Thanks in advance Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkWill0 -
Product descriptions & Duplicate Content: between fears and reality
Hello everybody, I've been reading quite a lot recently about this topic and I would like to have your opinion about the following conclusion: ecommerce websites should have their own product descriptions if they can manage it (it will be beneficial for their SERPs rankings) but the ones who cannot won't be penalized by having the same product descriptions (or part of the same descriptions) IF it is only a "small" part of their content (user reviews, similar products, etc). What I mean is that among the signals that Google uses to guess which sites should be penalized or not, there is the ratio "quantity of duplicate content VS quantity of content in the page" : having 5-10 % of a page text corresponding to duplicate content might not be harmed while a page which has 50-75 % of a content page duplicated from an other site... what do you think? Can the "internal" duplicated content (for example 3 pages about the same product which is having 3 diferent colors -> 1 page per product color) be considered as "bad" as the "external" duplicated content (same product description on diferent sites) ? Thanks in advance for your opinions!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuantokusta0 -
Pages and Keyword Structures, what do you think?
Hi, So I think the best way to do this would be to layout a fictitious example so here it is. Lets say you offer plumbing and painting services and want to start targeting 3 more locations near by. 'Plumber +Location' and 'Painter +Location' both get the exact same search so are equal. I would personally create a new page called '/plumber-and-painter-location/' Then have the title tag contain both keywords 'Plumber and Painter +Location'. BUT... maybe it would be better to have a page for each as this would then be more relevant SEO wise and the customer looking for a painter wouldn't be presented with non-relevant plumbing content. But this does mean now instead of 3 pages you need 6. And if you bolted on another services such as Plastering instead of the 3 pages you need 9. Basically If you offered Plumbing, Painting & Plastering in 3 different locations how would you structure it? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper0