Many times, the difference between getting seen on a search engine and getting clicked on from a search engine is your title and description. If they’re not compelling, the potential visitor isn’t going to think you have what they need. One of the obvious ways to increase your relevancy to the user is to include the terms you rank for in the page title and meta description. That way, when they see your website on the results page, they see the terms they searched for in bold.

That’s all well and good, and many website owners use that method with great success, but what happens when you rank (or want to rank) for a variety of terms that are hard to fit together in the short amount of space you have for your page title and description?

Hello makes-sense, my name’s counterintuitive, and I’m here to kill you. Secret weapon of the webmaster? Get rid of your meta description.

Think I’m crazy? Think about this. When Google, Yahoo!, or Live Search (hereafter referred to as Goohoolive, and yes goohoolive.com is taken) doesn’t find a meta description, what do they do? They scan the rest of your page for relevant content and will often times display the portion of it that contains the terms being searched for. So if you’ve got a decent amount of content on your homepage (and you should) relating to all of those terms you want to rank for, then you should have enough info for Google, Yahoo!, Live Search, et al to find and display.

Okay, I know it sounds risky, so I’ll try some assurance. First, you don’t have to get rid of your description altogether. I found one very large retail site that shortened it enough to achieve the same effect. Since large retail = big money and therefore (hopefully) less crazy, I’ll use them to back up my point.

Crucial.com is by far the largest internet retailer of computer memory there is. That probably has something to do with the fact that they’re owned by Micron, one of the world’s largest memory manufacturers, but I digress. If you go to their homepage and view their source code, here’s what you’ll see for their meta description:

<meta name="description" content="Memory upgrades from Crucial.com" />

Pretty short, right? That should be absolutely killing them on the SERPs, but it’s not. Below are screenshots of the search engine results page from Google for the top three terms in their industry: memory, computer memory, and ram.

As you can see, each of the descriptions vary somewhat, according to the keyword. Now, while I don’t think the content on their homepage is ideal, it gets the point across. For each of these three searches, they have bolded terms in a description that might otherwise be without.

Now, I haven’t tried this yet with any of the sites I manage, but I am thinking about it. What I’d like to know is if anyone else out there will admit to trying it and let me know what the results were/are.