Different approaches to meta-tags

Quicken is the number one personal finance software. Mint is an “online Quicken”  that’s seriously challenging it. It gained 160,000 users in its first six months after launching. It’s gaining 3000 new users a day and jumped from 600,000 to 850,000 users over the last few months. Mint’s got Quicken worried.

Comparing the approach taken to meta title and description tags by Quicken and Mint reveals two very different approaches:

Quicken has gone for human readability. The title makes it very clear that this is the Quicken site. The description underneath is a sales pitch, telling you what you will be able to do with the software and what problem it’s going to solve for you.

Mint has gone for keywords, using the most likely search queries that a user might use to search for personal finance software. The result? They rank higher on google.com for those search terms than Quicken, which for many of these search terms does not even appear on the first page.