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This is the second post in our series on how to use simple optimization techniques to get the best mileage from your content. Part two of the series is on creating a good description.

If you been involved in learning search engine marketing for any length of time then you know that proper titles and descriptions for every page of your site is a must. Even for a single page such as a lens or a hub, the description tag plays a huge roll in describing the content of the page.

What you may not know is that the use of some characters in your description such as quotes stops Google from reading anymore of the line which results in a short meta descriptions. Like the title tag, you only get so many characters to display. Right now, 155 characters is the cut-off; you can’t expect the full description to be displayed on search results if you have more than that.

Illegal characters example:

A description like this - Article marketing and Squidoo go together like “peas ‘n carrots!” Learn how to get the most out of your article marketing efforts, is seen by Google like this - Article marketing and Squidoo go together like.

Notice that as soon as Google’s spider see the first quote character it stops reading, cutting off keywords that you may have further into the text. To fix this simply do not use quotation marks in your descriptions.

This can simply be corrected by removing the quotes and the exclamation point characters.

Example Description:

Article marketing and Squidoo go together like peas and carrots. Learn how to get the most out of your article marketing efforts.

Do you notice a common theme with this list below?

Dog behavior problems and solution.
Great voip content site.
A lens about all aspects of sex magic.
Watch the funniest cat videos around the web.

Well for one, they’re too short. The cutoff for characters is 155. Use the space given to provide clear information about the content. Don’t worry if it’s to long as Google will truncate long descriptions anyways but it’s wise to be mindful on the space so as not to fill it with un-targeted ramble.

Meta description information can give users a clear idea of your site’s content and encourage users to click on your site in the search results pages. The description that’s displayed on search results influences the click-through rate for your listings – for longer search queries (4+ words) it’s usually more important than the title tag.