How To Use the “Description” Meta Tag
Correct usage of description meta tags provides both search engines and users with a summary of what your page is about. That should tell you how important it is to accurately describe your web page’s content.
Summaries Can Be Defined For Each Page
The beginning of the description meta tag gives a brief overview of the site’s offerings. Here’s an example:
<html>
<head>
<title>Brandon’s Baseball Cards – Buy Cards, Baseball News, Card Prices</title>
<meta name=”description=” content=”Brandon’s Baseball Cards provides a large selection of vintage and modern baseball cards for sale. We also offer daily baseball news and events in”>
</head>
<body>
A user performs the query [baseball cards]. The homepage appears as a result, with part of its description meta tag used as the snippet.
A user performs the query [rarest baseball cards]. One of the deeper pages, with its unique description meta tag used as the snippet, appears as a result.
A page’s description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. A page’s title may be a few words or a phrase, a page’s description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google Webmaster Tools provides a handy content analysis section that’ll tell you about any description meta tags that are either too short, long, or duplicated too many times (the same information is also shown for <title> tags). Like the <title> tag, the description meta tag is placed within the <head> tag of your HTML document.
Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say “might” because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page’s visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user’s query. Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice.
Things To Avoid:
- writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
- using generic descriptions like “This is a web page” or “Page about baseball cards”
- filling the description with only keywords
- copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag
- using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages
Next Week: Improving The Structure Of Your Website File Names
