The Description Meta Tag

The description tag allows you to describe the content that may be found on a specific page of your website. Like the title tag it is imperative that the description tag is different for EVERY page of your site as every page of your site should have different content and be discussing a different aspect, product, or service that you provide.

The Description tag is often the most “spammed” Meta Tag due to the weight this tag carries with the major search engines such as Yahoo and Google. While the description tag could contain, and probably should, in most cases A keyword or two (as they are relevant to the page) they must be written first and foremost to drive click throughs to your site.

See the description tag, outside of the title tag, is what search engine users see when deciding to click through to a website. Search engine users are savvier than ever when it comes to viewing spam and can see right through an all keyword laced description. If using an all keyword description and you do happen to obtain top search engine ranking you will be missing out on the precious clicks you are optimizing your site for in the first place.

You also have to remember that keyword spamming is frowned upon by all of the major search engines and as such even if you obtain top ranking it will be temporary and will most likely never be able to be achieved with that particular website.

The HTML Used: Start: <meta name=”Description” content=”

End: ” />

Example: <meta name=”Description” content=”Brand The Web is a premier search engine optimization company, Specializing in the fields of Search engine optimization, online internet marketing and optimized custom website design.” />

A Good Example of a Description Meta Tag:

We will use a page on a website about blue and green widgets for our example:

“Provides details on buying green and blue widgets in all available sizes including green widgets in extra large and bright blue widgets in children’s sizes.”

In this instance we used both of our target keywords as well, for example, we did a secondary target on the specific sizes that shoppers are specifically looking for when buying online. Now this would only of course work if those things were actually present on the site itself, but it gives you a good example of an optimized description that isn’t keyword spammer.

Some may try to lump the following description into the same category:

“provides blue widgets, green widgets, bright blue widgets, large green widgets, small blue widgets, all online.”

This clearly is not the same and is a good example of a “spam-like” description tag.

Description Tag Tips

- Keep it to the Google Maximum of Less.
Google shows the maximum of 153 characters. This means in those 153 characters you have the duty of capturing your potential visitors through text that is going to grab their attention. I typically like to max my descriptions to a maximum of 180 characters (yes that includes spaces). Use Word (or equivalent) to determine the exact amount of characters you are using in your description.

- Keep the Descriptions, descriptive.
Seems easy enough, but this is critical for both search engine positioning as well as total click throughs.