SEO Basics – Part 3 – Meta descriptions
Thursday
Apr 29, 2010
The meta description tag has varying levels of relevancy in different search engines. Some search engines still display it in their search results. It is recommended to try and get multiple versions of your main keywords and your main keywords themselves in this tag a few times.
Your meta description should never appear visually keyword-stuffed. The sentences should read well to the human eye. If you write a compelling description, it could boost your click-through rates and, thus, deliver you more targeted traffic.
Many search engines will use the meta description as part of the page abstract if the exact search term that was searched for is found in the meta description tag.
Additionally, it sometimes appears in search results if the search engine cannot extract meaningful content from the page copy or if the algorithm feels the meta description will provide a more useful presentation.
A good page title and description within the search results could mean that a number two or three listing gets more traffic than a number one listing. Apparently it doesn’t matter what the length of the Meta Description is as long as Google thinks it’s relevant. One point to note, though, is that Google will only display the first 150 characters in the search results listing!
