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Meta Descriptions – are they necessary?

August 6, 2008

It’s common knowledge that the content of a web page’s meta Description has no bearing on its placement on search results pages. So are they worth bothering with? The short answer is Yes.

The meta Description is a small piece of text that belongs in the (X)HTML <head> section. It usually resides with the Title tag (very important) and meta Keywords tag (not at all important). Its purpose is to describe, in one or two sentences, what the web page is all about. The syntax is something like this:

In the dim and distant past, the content was looked at by the spiders as part of the overall assessment of search engine ranking for keywords. But it was too easy to spam and the spiders now ignore it. So why is it still important?

Because it’s used on the search results page to describe your page. The first line of the result is your Title tag. The next two lines are an attempt by the search engine to best describe your page. If the meta Description is there, then it will be displayed. If it’s not there, then the search engine will display a chunk of text from your page – it could be anything and chances are it will not adequately describe the page and more likely deter visitors from clicking through to your site.

So not only are meta Descriptions necessary, they should be informative, enticing and unique to each page. About 150 to 200 characters should suffice.

Filed in: Search Engine Optimisation

Comments

Metatags are one of the most imrpotant SEO things to do.No metter how many links you build for your site,whitout well optimized metatags and content you will never reach 1st page of Google

From Italian Translation on 6 Aug 09 at 22:01

I totally agree, my site do not have many in bound links. But the first thing i do to promote a page in meta tag.

From coal scuttle on 18 Feb 10 at 23:47