Author: Dr. Manus Ward │Head of Digital Strategy and Data Protection │Hotelconsultant.com is a qualified and experienced former hotel manager, culinary Olympic team manager and hospitality Head of School who is passionate about passing on the knowledge he gained from one of the few hotel digital strategy doctorates in the world to you the hotelier. Bonus: If you have any problems with this contact me (100% free) at manus@hotelconsultant.com or 086 8185829 on this or any aspect of your hotel’s digital strategy.
Why do we need to do this
The meta description tag is essentially the bottom two grey lines that appears for each result on the Google search engine page. Research indicates it is the dominant information in a Google search result for persuading potential guests to click on a page.
What is a Meta Description
A Meta Description is a concise description of the contents of the page. It is recommended that you limit your text to 155 characters max in order for the full title to be seen in a Google search. Here is what it looks like to a Google searcher:
Here is what it looks like in code and in the example below the words “Hotel restaurant’s page” would be the only part the searcher would actually see.
<head>
< meta name=”description” content=”Hotel restaurant’s page”>
< /head>
Google has stated that meta descriptions are not a ranking factor but if you look at the example below Google does search the meta description and highlights the keywords to searchers. You would also have to ask why does Google scan the meta description if it does not use it in searches, but even if it does not it is 50% of what your searchers see in the results and Google will highlight the keywords so you want more of them highlighted than your competitors.
What do I do: Unless you are reasonably experienced with code or at least WordPress I recommend you get somebody else to do the techie bit but I recommend you do Google keyword research and construct a logical sentence with the most searched keywords appropriate for each individual hotel page. Remember Google ranks pages not entire websites.
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