SEO Article Series - Guide to SEO Meta Description Tags
These SEO articles are excerpted from an SEO article series on creating search engine optimized meta tags. This is a short summary on SEO meta description tags and goes along with Titles, Description and Keyword Meta Tags, Guide to SEO Title Tags and Guide to SEO Meta Keyword Tags to complete the series.
Guide to SEO Meta Description Tags
by Valerie DiCarlo - VDC Enterprises, LLC
The Meta description tag is a piece of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> </Head> section of a web page. It is usually placed after the title tag and before the meta keywords tag. The meta description does not impact your page’s ranking by itself as a stand-alone influence in the search engines, but does have a greater impact when combined with the title tag and page content. So as an end result in combination, the meta description tag can still come in very handy in your overall SEO campaigns.
All search engines provide some level of support for the meta description tag, some more than others. However, proper use of this tag may allow you to influence the description of your page that appears in the search results as well as assist the search engine in determining the theme of your page. Strong messaging can help influence clicks on your listings versus your competition by delivering on the promise of semantic mapping in the mind of the searcher. It’s worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages, because it gives you some influence on the description that appears in some of the search engines.
Key Considerations When Developing Your Meta Description Tags:
- Use this tag to give a 1 – 3 sentence (30 words or less) keyword rich description of what the page is about.
- Like the title tag, align your meta description with the page content.
- Like the title tag, description tags should be page specific.
- Description tag can be used as a marketing message.
Not every search engine will make use of the meta description tag and will automatically generate its own description for the page, however, if you do a solid job of developing your description tags in defining the theme of the page, many times the search engines default to these tags - especially if the title/meta description/meta keyword tags all line up with the page content.
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