Article Blurb Important or Not?

[Livenomadic]

I use a very standard format for my listings of articles:

Article 1 Title

Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb

Article 2 Title

Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb

Article 3 Title

Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb Article Blurb

You get the idea...

Currently my blurbs are very small and wimpy: "A guide to blue widget making around the world." or something similar, only one sentense.

How important is this text (that isnt link text) to the SERP of the article itself? If I wrote longer and better blurbs would I do better in the SERPs?

[ken_b]

I suspect that one or two short, well written, sentences as a blurb can be a benefit because they allow for placement of very related keywords. That could provide a buffer for search strings that don't quite match the article title.

[createErrorMsg]

I would think those blurbs won't get you placed better, unless the page on which the blurb is displayed is otherwise optimized for the keywords in the blurb.

In other words, if the page has one article blurb for each of blue, red, green, orange, tall, low-carb, extra cheesy, no-fat, and titanium widgets, the page is likely only optimized for the keyword Widgets. In this case, adding more sentences probably isn't going to greatly increase your optimization for that keyword (how many times can you reasonably pack "widgets" into a few sentences?).

I suppose, however, that if the blurb were long enough, you might actually be able to sneak it into a SERP for one of those specific widgets, but it would then be competing with the whole article page to which the blurb links. I'm undecided on whether that would be a good, bad or indifferent thing.

cEM