Description Meta Tag SEO
May 19th, 2009 | 
Author: In the previous post we examined some info on meta tags. The focus of the post was on optimizing your title tag of your site. This info is widely accepted and used by any SEO Company that is worth anything.
The description meta tag is useful as it is what will appear underneath the title of your title website when viewed on a search engine results page or SERP. Many SEO advocates do not agree with me on my methodology and thoughts on the description Meta tag.
While the Meta tag is a great place to make a quick pitch for your website, your website must first appear in the SERP’s. I do not use the description Meta Tag on the majority of my sites. Here is why.
The search engine will bold the keywords or search words you used when you performed your search. If you do not use the description tag google will use keywords and text from your webpage to fill in the description.
If you have good content on your page this will help you with both rankings and a description that meets the searchers request. Let’s go back to Mary. Her title is Artist Paint | Paint for Artist Free Shipping (See Natural SEO Title Meta Tags) Mary has provided quality content on her site.
She has sections dedicated to acrylic artist paint, oil artist paint, and watercolors for artist.
The description Meta tag should not exceed 160 characters. There is no way to provide a good description of all the artist paints on Mary’s website with 160 characters. Search Engines have become quite smart…. So why not let the search engine pick out the most relevant information from the page.
Advantage number 2 is that the keywords acrylic, oil and water are not in Mary’s title. If she lets the search engine fill in the description for her, has good content on her pages she is expanding the range of terms her site can be found when a prospective customer is searching for various artist paint.
Advantage 3: I have left the description tag on my site blank and then watched my site go from #3 to #1 on google. I also saw an increase in the range of keywords the website got page 1 rankings in.
The description Meta tag is not going to make or break your site in rankings: however I am a firm believer in using every advantage I can to get top rankings. The next post will cover the keyword Meta description. This is also a tag that my philosophy is different than many other SEO posts you will read. Till next time happy natural optimizing of your title and description Meta tags.
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- Natural SEO Title Meta Tags Natural SEO and on page optimization starts with meta tags....
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Thanks for the heads up. Application of the research is done in the form of content generation. It is important to remember that content should not only be search engine friendly but also interesting and useful to the average human visitor. The third most important rule of Search Engine Optimization is to pay attention to Title tags, Meta tags like description and keyword, Heading tags and Body text.
I have been considering doing this for sometime now. I have so many different types of lifts on my home page, but could never fit them all in the description. I’ve just deleted my meta description tag. I’m crossing my fingers that it works for me! Thanks of the info. Jeremy
This is interesting. I’ve never hear anyone else advocating to leave the meta description blank. I’m going to test this and report what happens for me.
I will be very interested in how it work for you. Remember to have a lot of relevent words on the page!