<META DESCRIPTION> tag lost its shine after the emergence of off-page factors (like link popularity) for rankings in SERPS. In fact it lost its purpose to a great extent when Google started using contextual content from within the page as the description of the URL in its SERPS.

However in an interesting turn of events, <META DESCRIPTION> is back in business!

Most search engines, including Google are now using the <META DESCRIPTION> content as the description of the URL in their SERPS. The page <TITLE> is now being shown as the listing title with <META DESCRIPTION> as the description of the URL. If you compare it with Google AdWords, you can consider the <TITLE> as the Headline and <META DESCRIPTION> as the Description. Therefore, you must use it to outline your strength, your unique selling proposition and if possible your offer.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal mentioned cited this interesting Meta Description used by NextStudent.com in his article,

Looking for federal or private student loans for School? Get up to 40k Fast: Call 877-680-9879. Student loan consolidation? Call 800-299-4639. NextStudent- College Funding Made Simple.

You can also include your phone number (as cited in the above advertisement - description) for the prospect who is in a hurry! May be you will end up prospecting without having the visitor hit your website! In fact, with the latest version of IE and the FireFox plugins, the phone numbers listed in this description become hot-links, which a visitor can simply click and get connected on a voice call through Skype. And you can close a sale!

And yes, many SEO specialists believe that higher CTR on your SERPS listing (due to improved <TITLE> and <META DESCRIPTION>) can help you further improve your rankings.

BTW, I forgot to mention that some expert copywriters may like to even put in their headlines and teasers to pre-sell the product / services!

Lisa Ditlefsen says:

Basically if you think about it the meta description tag is your FREE ad! If you have experience in running a pay per click campaign I’m sure you have put a lot of thought into what the PPC ad says. The ad is what distinguish you from all the other PPC ads right? So why should it be any different in the organic SERPs? The title tag is your free headline and the meta description tag is your FREE ad, this is where you have a chance to ad hook someone in. How many times have you searched for something, got to the results and been put off by the description, it can’t possibly be what you were looking for!!?

May be people do not give so much importance to this FREE ad, because it is FREE! It is never late. Give proper attention to your website <META DESCRIPTION> tags and turn your organic traffic to a highly targeted FREE traffic.

It all started with pixels. Alex Tew started selling pixels with milliondollarhomepage.com to earn some quick money. Public relation clicked and he became a success story with a wild frenzy among people to own a "piece of history". The "me too" crowd followed and we saw thousands of similar sites selling priceless pixels and few smart companies selling scripts to build such sites.

After one year came Joel Comm, who improvised the concept to link words instead of pixels, and launched 500words.com. This innovation was expected from an Internet marketing wizard like Joel, who is well known among Internet marketers and has a capacity to create a loud buzz. He sold the entire inventory and laughed his way to his bank with few hundred thousand dollars! Just like milliondollarhomepage.com, this improvisation triggered hundreds of similar website and scripts that can be installed to launch similar sites. In fact, I also launched software called wordsitebuilder with my friend Arun Agrawal, because I believe in selling spades when the gold rush is on.

Now, exactly after one year of the 500words.com gold rush, I came across another concept - Wordhugger.com & MillionDollarWiki. Now they have logically extended the legacy and moved on from words to a page dedicated to a given word / phrase. They have presented the concept in a much more lucrative way for prospective buyers. I was just wondering how is this different from squidoo.com? This seems to be picking up and I am watching the show .

So, overall, there has been a gradual transition from a pixel >> word >> page What’s next? - A website / or a blog?

Let’s watch the show!

I recently read Ed Kohler’s comment where he has ranked the importance of various "Google Apps" programs in the following order:

1. Docs
2. Presentation
3. Spreadsheet

However, I beg to differ.

In my personal experience I have found spreadsheet to be most used online collaborative tool of the entire office suite.

An online spreadsheet can be used in hundreds of ways for different purpose and help you collaborate much better for several reasons:

1. Spreadsheets keep data in a more organized way which can be further imported / exported as a comma delimited file and also imported / exported from a third party database

2. Some common usage can be sales tracking, basic level project tracking, bug management, issue tracking, any collaborative data gathering, managing petty accounts, etc. The list is endless. You cannot do all this using word processor or presentation tools online.

3. Every spreadsheet has several sheets, which enables various versions of inputs to be gathered from different sources, all put together in one place with a very easy-to-shuffle mechanism.

May be my opinion is based on the way I use Google Apps!
What is your opinion?

Abhishek

Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL) is one of the top-five IT companies in India.

Recently I saw their latest media campaign which says: HCL - a $4 billion company.

I have never seen such a poor tagline before. In fact it was amusing and I could not stop laughing when I saw it on an outdoor display. The first thing that came to my mind was - "Is HCL up for sale? And is this the price they are asking for?"

This tagline does not communicate anything to a prospective customer which can help him in understanding the values and/or goals of the company. It only communicates that this company wants to SELL (Because $4 billion was their sale in last FY) and actually HARDSELL with such a stupid tagline.  No one is interested in your last FY turnover. People or prospective customers want to know what you can do for them and how are you different from other peer companies.

Frankly, this tagline sounds like a joy-cry from a child who is over-excited with his maths score (and that too when he has not topped the class!).

HCL is no doubt a great company. In fact I am highly inspired by one of their promoter - Mr. Ajai Chowdhry. But whoever created the campaign has been very immature and hardly understand branding. They could not capture the essence of this company and have totally misrepresented them in public. HCL is a pioneering company which has several interesting innovation to their credit. None of them have been used to highlight the achiements of the company. In fact I was reading about Shiv Nadar in Forbes Asia magazine as he was on the cover as the "Tamil Tycoon". The article highlights on the "new style" engagement model that HCL has adopted by taking a long term stand with their customers and is sharing the ups and downs of clients’ business! I could not stop myself from saying - WOW! Its a winner formula. But unfortunately for a widely used public campaign they used the "$4 billion company" tagline.

As a prospective customer - "How does your being a $4 billion company helps me apart from getting an assurance that you wont be bankrupt and out of business soon?"

I hope they rethink over it soon..