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The "plan" doesn't look much like a plan... more like a list of (as already mentioned, low value) seo tactics to me.

Has anyone suggested tackling some less competitive, but related keyword terms first? It's easier to climb the tree from the bottom than to try and jump onto the top of it and you get to pick some low-hanging fruit on the way up.

What is important to the business - ranking for these highly competitive terms or more traffic/conversions now. Don't lose site of the business goals.

If you look at the sites that are currently ranking for your competitive search terms, can you honestly say that your site, your content delivers better value to the potential visitors and deservers to rank up there?

How will visitors to your site react to such an avalanche of content. My worry would be that if you publish too much the individual articles can get lost and don't get the eye-balls they deserve.

If you list new content on the home and/or section pages - how much can they promote?

Another thought I have is if you're publishing 1000's of articles - are you revising/pruning old articles too?

Agree with pbhatt, a compelling description that convinces searchers to click through can make a ton of difference. Without one, even a high ranking page may not get the traffic you'd expect.

Thanks Alex, I had a feeling I'd read something about people trying to use multiple-snippets in a single meta-description to try and get relevant descriptions into the serps depending on the keywords used.

A bit too dependant on the whims of google for my liking, and if we're talking about an e-commerce site, then it's enough work generating a single quality description for each product let along multiple ones.

When are the users likely to see the content of meta-descriptions?

If they are only going to be visible in the SERPS and you know they are going to be cut off then they will never see the words after the cut-off point.

Any effort writing these words is going to be wasted.

If these words are important in describing/selling the product then I'd reword the meta-description so that these were before the cut off point.

If you can make your description more concise without losing readability and avoid the cut-off altogether I'd go for that in preference.

I'm not sure if it's worth truncating the descriptions yourself and adding '...' or just letting the search engine do it. Would the search engine ever use a snippet from the middle/end of a meta-description? (perhaps someone else can answer that?)

Are these descriptions automatically generated from the page content?

What do you mean by a little long!?

No direct experience, but if you're images are being "stolen" and re-used anyway you might as well try and find a way to cater for this need in a legitimate way that also provides some kind of benefit.

I guess it really depends on what's important to you/your business. Finding ways to support the social sharing of material, generating some good will and generating backlinks is obviously more important to Wired than the actual images themselves.

I've used SEO Spyglass to go this in the past when I've wanted to collect a vast number of backlinks.

Again, think about who's going to be reading the meta description and what you want it to do.

I like to think of the meta description (along with the title) as a classified-ad for your page when it is displayed in the SERPS. You want to use the description to help entice searchers to click on your page.

So, make it compelling, put keywords near the front so that they get highlighted, and try to reassure people that they are going to find what they're looking for by clicking on your page. If you can get some benefits in there, then that's even better.

If you want people to click on these snippets in the serps, also remember that you want to make the titles as appealing as possible. It's not just about ranking, but click though too!

I suspect that shorter, more straightforward titles, that closely match the search query, are going to perform better.

Take a look at what Amazon do for example (picked at random!):

Something like this in the H1:  "TeckNet NEW Kindle Leather Case / Cover With Magnetic Clasp for NEW Amazon Kindle / 6 inch / 2011 generation / Book Style - Black,TeckNet,MT-183-Black"

changes in the title tag to: "TeckNet NEW Kindle Leather Case: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics"