I think a lot of web designers and internet marketers gloss over and often neglect the description meta tag. I would like to stress the value of the description meta tag in this post.
The big “G” uses the description meta tag as a suggestion for what it will use in their search results. Think of the description meta tag as two full lines of ad copy. You have two full lines (about 155 charachters or so total) to accomplish two objectives:
- Write a compelling sentence to entice surfers to click on your link.
- Give your keywords for that particular page to Google so it can store it for searches.
Don’t believe me? Do a search, then click on one of the search results. Next, right click on the page and do a “View Page Source”. Look for:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="...your words...">
Do you see the similarities between the two lines in the search results and what the description meta tag is for that page? Now, with Google nothing holds true all the time. More often than not though, the 2nd and 3rd line in the search results will be very similar to what you wrote for a description meta tag.
So, web designers and internet marketers, when you are crafting your page, don’t ignore the importance of the description meta tag.
October 31, 2009 @ 8:26 am
The longest title tag I can find is 70 characters. I did find a 120 character title tag, but Google lopped it off to just 62 plus the three trailing periods.
July 10, 2010 @ 11:46 am
One of my friends, who is also a Minneapolis SEO expert, also uses additional meta tags which have helped his website earn an impressive page rank 6!
The “all in one SEO” plugin for WordPress doesn’t like some of these, but that’s ok. You only need to have it on the index page and use the plugin for the rest.