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John Hanlon Reviews

John’s Monday Tip of the Week: The importance of meta descriptions

Good evening,

Hope everyone has been having a wonderful Monday so far!

As many of us know, prescription one of the big things we want to promote on our websites is “sharing.” Through social media, we want to share the news, the opportunities and the abilities our websites offer BUT it’s even better if we can get some of our listeners to share our content as well.

That brings us to John’s Monday Tip of the Week!

This week’s tip has been provided courtesy of 1260 AM The ANSWER, our new Newstalk site in St. Louis.

That station has been trying to promote their mobile apps page, which was created in the “Virtual Page Editor” of the admin tool. The station wanted that important page to be easily shareable on Facebook and other social networks and they wanted a certain text to appear every time the page was shared.

They wanted to choose the text that appeared when any listener shared that page on Facebook and now there’s a way to do it using meta descriptions.

With that in mind, our developers set it up so that the page’s meta description (see the “Download our mobile apps today” text above), which the station inserted when they created the back page, appears when any user attempts to share this page on Facebook. Now, we can’t guarantee that Facebook will always pick up the meta description (and users do have the option to change them when they share the posts if they choose) but this solution has been working so far for us with solid results.

I just tried to share this station’s mobile apps page on my personal Facebook page and it automatically inserted the meta description for me, letting my Facebook friends know about the ability to download these mobile apps directly off the WSDZ website.

See below.

The results of WSDZ’s work have been great and as you can see on their mobile page’s social media icons, the page has been shared on Facebook 38 times and it’s been tweeted out 8 times (and that’s only been over the past few weeks).

We want more our content to be shared and re-shared all over social media and the meta description set-up makes it easier for us to ensure that the message we want to send out is being used when listeners interact with our content.

With that in mind, please make sure to always fill out the meta description field when you’re creating or editing your back pages. It might not seem important at first but this field gives us the ability to control the message that’s going out about our content and that’s a huge opportunity for us.

If you want some help setting up meta descriptions for some of your back pages, let me know.

This has been John’s Monday Tip of the Week.

Have an epic week, y’all!

Best,

John

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