The Meta Description Tag
The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don't
affect your page's ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but
this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns.
What Is the Meta Description Tag?
The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs
inside
the <Head> </Head> section of a Web page. It usually is placed
after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag, although the order is not
important.
The proper syntax for this HTML tag is: <META NAME="Description"
CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two goes here.">
We used to believe that the purpose of the Meta description tag was
twofold: to help the page rank highly for the words that were contained
within it, as well as to provide a nice description in the search engine
results pages (SERPs). However, today it appears that, similar to the Meta
keywords tag, the information you place in this tag is *not* given
any weight in the ranking algorithms of Google, and only a tiny amount of
weight in Yahoo's.
In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases
in your
Meta description tag or not, it won't affect the position of your page in
the SERPs for the words that are important to you. In fact, you could
easily leave it out altogether. But should you?
Well, if you're already happy with the "snippets" of text that the
search engines post from your page in any given search query, then there's
no reason to have a Meta description tag on your pages. However, it's
important to note that the snippet the engines use will vary, depending on
what the searcher typed into the engine.
Let's take a step back and look at what the search engines show
in the SERPs. It can get a little bit confusing, but if you try out your own
searches in the various engines, you'll have a better idea of what I'm
talking about. The search engines are constantly changing this sort of
thing, plus they all behave in slightly different ways, as you'll see in
my examples.
At Google, if you search for a site by URL like this: www.highrankings.com, the snippet you see
is the first instance of text on
the page. Interestingly enough, on my home page, an image alt attribute
tag is the first instance of words "on the page," and that's what shows up
as part of my "snippet" for this particular search. (The image is a
clickable image, so this jibes with my other theory of Google indexing the
words in the alt attributes of clickable images).
For this type of search, Yahoo displays the Meta description
info. It's
important to note that generally the only people searching using URLs are
site owners trying to see if their pages are indexed. Therefore, you
shouldn't worry too much about what you see under those circumstances.
So let's try something that a real person might search for when looking
for what we have to offer -- how about "SEO copy"?
In Google, my xyz page shows up second in the results with the following snippet:
"... techniques: Search engine optimization (SEO) consultants who
need to edit the existing copy of their clients' sites as a matter of
course. ..."
Not the best of snippets, to say the least.
In this case, we don't have the phrase "SEO copy" in my Meta description
tag, nor is it anywhere on the page as a complete phrase. Because of this, Google has simply found
instances where the word SEO and the word copy
were near each other, and used the surrounding text as the snippet.
Now, if I felt that "SEO copy" was a viable keyword phrase that people
might be searching on, I may want to adjust my page accordingly so that
the phrase appeared in my Meta description tag as well as somewhere in the
body text. Again, this is not because it would help it to rank highly, but
because I would receive a more suitable description that was more in tune
with what the searcher was looking for. One can surmise that they might be
more inclined to click on my listing in that case.
More Tests
We also recently discovered that when we tested a nonsense word
in the
Meta description tag of a page (with the word not appearing elsewhere on
the page), Google did not find it. But when we added the word to the
visible text copy on the page, Google would bring up the test page when
the nonsense word was searched for. Not only that, but it displayed that
part of the Meta description tag where the nonsense word appeared.
In Yahoo, my nonsense-word test page was found, even if the word
appeared only in the Meta description tag and nowhere else on the page. Interestingly enough, however, Yahoo didn't display the part of the tag
where the word was placed. They displayed only the beginning of the
description, and cut it off after about 45 words. WeI purposely placed my
nonsense word deep into my description tag to see if it would get picked
up. In this case, the word appeared as the last of 138 words in the tag. I'll probably add even more words at some point to see
if there's any
cutoff point where Yahoo will stop indexing.
Other Engines
We also tested a few searches at Teoma and MSN. Each engine
is slightly
different in how they display the Meta description tag. Teoma seems to
find the words in the tag, but doesn't necessarily display them. When I
searched for a unique sampling of text from one of my tags, Teoma found
the page, but chose to display the first sentence on the page instead. Not
surprisingly, the current MSN search worked the same as Yahoo. However,
MSN's search technology preview (which
is the new engine they're working on) behaved similarly to Google on all
tests regarding Meta descriptions.
Our new recommendation for this tag is not to worry too much about
it.
If you have some great call-to-action statements utilizing your keyword
phrases on your Web pages, they will probably show up in your snippets at
the engines. But since it's easy enough to create a compelling sentence or
2 that incorporates your main keyword phrases, you might as well do this
for your Meta descriptions.
Certainly, the more control you have over your listing
in the SERPs,
the more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta description tags can
help with that, then it's certainly worth the time to create compelling,
keyword-rich ones.
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