how often should i change/update my meta descriptions?

[MelissaRWE]

hi, I have a question about updating my product descriptions.

Our site is an e-commerce site with a few thousand products for sale. we wrote all the product descriptions and meta descriptions (which are the same) over a year ago. The truth is, most of our content (text) is pulled from wiki articles.

Would you recommend that we update these descriptions? We have decent placement in google for some items, but we are looking for another boost in the serps. any suggestions?

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], MelissaRWE!

the meta descriptions should be unique to and descriptive of each page.
note that only 160 or so characters are displayed before truncation.
it is your "sales job" to make the SERP entry clickable.
however, the meta description has no direct "boost in the serps" effect.

[MelissaRWE]

thanks for that tip, saves us some time... I guess my real question is, what should our next step be for a site that is easy for google to crawl and index. Many of our category pages place well for keywords in the title (4th-7th spot in a lot of cases)...

What we want is to take the next step in seo and move up a spot or two. We've been finding it difficult to gain any more rank than we had at this time 1 year ago. We're sitting at a spot right now where we are getting between 1500 and 2000 visitors a day and like everyone else, we want more.

Is it simply a matter of acquiring links to these particular pages or is there something else we can do? thanks for any suggestions