Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm also wondering if Google will let you get away with an exclamation point and/or ALL CAPS phrase if you want to emphasize it.
I usually only use prices when I know they're really excellent. It's up to the particular marketing approach. Before the web, when I was in retail, my mentor taught me that you should focus marketing efforts on just one of three directions: price, selection, or service. Not that you ignore two of them, but you LEAD with just one and become known for that. I'd let that overall marketing decision guide me on whether to use prices in the meta description or not. Google certainly will display it.
How about repeating the title in the meta description so Google doesn't select it's own snippet?
When I initially launch a page, I often will use the title as a basis for the meta description, since it's likely to contain the search terms I've targeted. As rankings develop and inbound links enhance onpage factors, I might tune the description to include the most important phrases that are ranking.
But it's a waste to limit the description to the c64-character title, and the repetition on the results page doesn't make for the best searcher experience.
Google will generally give you about 150-155 characters for the snippet (or break at the end of a sentence of roughly that length), so it's possible to craft a very strong marketing message that combines phrases you're likely to rank on.
I break my description conceptually into what I call a 150/250 character format... the first 150 characters or slightly less including a page's prime words or phrases as a self-contained thought in one sentence, and then 100 additional characters to play with for adding secondary vocabulary.
That said, there are some sites where... usually because of the number of pages... it's simply not possible to do this for every page, and I rely on the fabled "Google snippets team" to come up with something good. This has been a contentious area of discussion here, I know, and on thin, low PR, templated pages you might find that a dynamically generated description gets more pages displayed for you than omitting the description will.
I've found that most dynamically generated descriptions are pretty lame, but then this can also be true of the snippets pulled from purely database-driven templated pages. A lot depends on the kind of snippet Google is likely to pull from page content, and that's something you also need to think about.
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All of my meta descriptions are dynamically generated. How does this strike you?
