FIGURE 6-3
In some search engine results, the text displayed below the title comes from the meta description tag.Despite the fact that not all search engines use the description included in the meta description
tags, all of them do readthe description tag. They also use the description included there as one
of the factors considered during the ranking process.The catch with meta description tags is that they work differently for different search engines. For
example, Google gives very little weight to meta descriptions. Instead, the Google search engine
looks at the text on a page. And on the SERPs, Google doesn’t display the meta description text
either. What does show is the content surrounding the instance of the keyword on your site.
Google calls this a snippet.The Yahoo! search engine, however, does put weight on meta description text, and it uses that text
directly under the web site link on SERPs.So, what does this all mean? First, it means that your meta description tag isn’t the most important
piece of coding your web page. However, it also means that you don’t want to skip over the meta
description tag, because some search engines actually do use it.So you should include the meta description tag on each page of your web site using the following
guidelines: Different search engines allow different description text lengths. A good rule of thumb is
to keep your descriptions to around 200–250 characters. That’s about enough space for
one to two descriptive sentences.
Every page in your web site should include its own, unique meta description tag.
Meta description tags should include keywords with high levels of importance or
effectiveness.
Meta description text should not be the same as the text included in the title tag.Meta description tags ..............................................................................................
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