Tuesday, September 20, 2011

SEO: Make use of the "description" meta tag

7:34 AM | Posted by DOTA | | Edit Post
Summaries can be defined for each page
A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about (1). Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag mi ght be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.  Googl e 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.

(1) The beginning of the description meta tag for our homepage, which gives a brief overview of the site's offerings.
(2) A user performs the query [baseball cards]. Our homepage appears as a result, with part of its description meta tag used as the snippet.
(3) A user performs the query [rarest baseball cards]. One of our deeper pages, with its unique description meta tag used as the snippet, appears as a result.

<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>

What are the merits of description meta tags?
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 i f i t does a good j ob of matchi ng up wi th a user' s query. Alternatively, Google might use your site's description in the Open Directory Project if your site is listed there (learn how to prevent search engines from displaying ODP data). Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. The Webmaster Central Blog has an informative post on improving snippets with better description meta tags.

Words in the snippet are bolded when they appear in the user's query (2). This gives the user clues about whether the content on the page matches with what he or she is looking for. (3) is another example, this time showing a snippet from a description meta tag on a deeper page (whi ch i deal l y has i ts own uni que descri pti on meta tag) containing an article.

Accurately summarize the page's content
Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.
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

Use unique descriptions for each page
Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain (e.g. searches using the site: operator). If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn't feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page's content.
Avoid:
  •  using a single description meta tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Followers

Powered by Blogger.

Blogger Template created with Artisteer.