Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag, as its name suggests, allows you to describe your page content. The description should be a short, keyword-rich paragraph capturing the main topic of the page - giving the search engines an accurate overview of the page.

Remember, the meta description, along with the title, are what encourage people to click on your site from the Search Engine results pages. The title and description should be written to motivate people into visiting your site instead of your competition.

All spidering search engines provide some support for the meta description tag, Teoma, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb make most use of it. Search engines that don't recognise the tag will grab some text from your page and substitute it for the description. This text grabbed is usually based on the search term.

The meta description tag should contain your pages keywords. Place the Keywords as close to the beginning of your description as you can to achieve the best results. This is where techniques like keyword proximity come into play. Avoid repeating keywords more than 2 times, some search engines consider this to be Spam and may penalise the page.

Different search engines vary the allowed length for meta description tags. Try to use short descriptions around 150 characters. Although some search engines display more than 150 characters, keeping the length to around 150 prevents it from being cut down by those who don't and preserves its message.

It is essential that you write good titles and descriptions for your pages. Some search engines place extra Relevance on the words used in the description. If you take extra care and time when constructing your page titles and meta description tags, and tailor them so that they are enticing, keyword rich and descriptive, your web pages will rank more effectively.