Daily SEO Tip – Description Tag
Continuing in the series of SEO Tips I started last week – after a brief rainy camping vacation, I want to discuss the Description meta tag.
The DESCRIPTION Meta Tag
Here is an example description meta tag which should appear in-between the <HEAD> tags of your web page(s):
<meta name=”description” content=”Videozine.ca, a Toronto based web video production and consumer video services company, offers VHS to DVD transfers, video encoding for MySpaceTV and YouTube, WordPress blog integration and basic SEO services.”>
The description meta tag is less important for optimization, but it is still utilized by the search engines.
I 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, and 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.
What this means is that, 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.
This then begs the question, should you?
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.
Make your description meta tags short but informative – if you can trim them to less than 13 words and you feel that they can still give enough information to make the user visit your site, you’ve done well. If your description tag is over 13 words, try to think how you could reduce the amount of words and still say what you want to say.
Why should your description meta tags be so short? Well, usually the search engine only displays a small part of it in the results list, and if the tag contains too many words, the “extra” words are cut off.
