The Meta Description Tag
by Jill Whalen
Updated October 2004
The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don't affect
your page's ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can
still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns.
What Is the Meta Description Tag?
The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs inside the
<Head> </Head> section of a Web page. It usually is placed after
the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag, although the order is not
important.
The proper syntax for this HTML tag is: <META
NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or two
goes here.">
I used to believe that the purpose of the Meta description tag was twofold:
to help the page rank highly for the words that were contained within it, as
well as to provide a nice description in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
However, today it appears that, similar to the Meta keywords tag, the
information you place in this tag is *not* given any weight in the
ranking algorithms of Google, and only a tiny amount of weight in Yahoo's.
In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases in your Meta
description tag or not, it won't affect the position of your page in the SERPs
for the words that are important to you. In fact, you could easily leave it out
altogether. But should you?
Well, if you're already happy with the "snippets" of text that the
search engines post from your page in any given search query, then there's no
reason to have a Meta description tag on your pages. However, it's important to
note that the snippet the engines use will vary, depending on what the searcher
typed into the engine.
Let's take a step back and look at what the search engines show in the SERPs.
It can get a little bit confusing, but if you try out your own searches in the
various engines, you'll have a better idea of what I'm talking about. The
search engines are constantly changing this sort of thing, plus they all behave
in slightly different ways, as you'll see in my examples.
At Google, if you search for a site by URL like this: www.highrankings.com,
the snippet you see is the first instance of text on the page. Interestingly
enough, on my home page, an image alt attribute tag is the first instance of
words "on the page," and that's what shows up as part of my
"snippet" for this particular search. (The image is a clickable
image, so this jibes with my other theory of Google indexing the words in the
alt attributes of clickable images. See this
forum thread from Dec. 2003.)
For this type of search, Yahoo displays the Meta description info. It's
important to note that generally the only people searching using URLs are site
owners trying to see if their pages are indexed. Therefore, you shouldn't worry
too much about what you see under those circumstances.
So let's try something that a real person might search for when looking for
what I have to offer -- how about "SEO copy"?
In Google, my Nitty-gritty
handbook page shows up second in the results with the following snippet:
"... techniques: Search engine optimization (SEO) consultants who need
to edit the existing copy of their clients' sites as a matter of course.
..."
Not the best of snippets, to say the least.
In this case, I don't have the phrase "SEO copy" in my Meta
description tag, nor is it anywhere on the page as a complete phrase. Because
of this, Google has simply found instances where the word SEO and the word copy
were near each other, and used the surrounding text as the snippet.
Now, if I felt that "SEO copy" was a viable keyword phrase that
people might be searching on, I may want to adjust my page accordingly so that
the phrase appeared in my Meta description tag as well as somewhere in the body
text. Again, this is not because it would help it to rank highly, but because I
would receive a more suitable description that was more in tune with what the
searcher was looking for. One can surmise that they might be more inclined to
click on my listing in that case.
Let's look at Yahoo for the same phrase. They've ranked the page at #3, and
used the following snippet:
"Learn SEO copywriting with Jill Whalen's special report -- The
Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines."
Now that's a good snippet! Well, guess what? That's my Meta description tag
for that page. Even though the exact phrase wasn't in the tag, and neither was
the word "copy," Yahoo still chose to display it for this search
query. I'm guessing this is because that phrase is actually nowhere on the
page, other than in the Title tag. So with Yahoo, having a decent Meta
description tag was very worthwhile in this instance.
More Tests
I also recently discovered that when I tested a nonsense word in the Meta
description tag of a page (with the word not appearing elsewhere on the page),
Google did not find it. But when I added the word to the visible text copy on
the page, Google would bring up the test page when the nonsense word was
searched for. Not only that, but it displayed that part of the Meta description
tag where the nonsense word appeared.
In Yahoo, my nonsense-word test page was found, even if the word appeared only
in the Meta description tag and nowhere else on the page. Interestingly enough,
however, Yahoo didn't display the part of the tag where the word was placed.
They displayed only the beginning of the description, and cut it off after
about 45 words. I purposely placed my nonsense word deep into my description
tag to see if it would get picked up. In this case, the word appeared as the
last of 138 words in the tag. I'll probably add even more words at some point
to see if there's any cutoff point where Yahoo will stop indexing.
Other Engines
I also tested a few searches at Teoma and MSN. Each engine is slightly
different in how they display the Meta description tag. Teoma seems to find the
words in the tag, but doesn't necessarily display them. When I searched for a
unique sampling of text from one of my tags, Teoma found the page, but chose to
display the first sentence on the page instead. Not surprisingly, the current
MSN search worked the same as Yahoo. However, MSN's search technology preview (which is the new engine
they're working on) behaved similarly to Google on all tests regarding Meta
descriptions.
My new recommendation for this tag is not to worry too much about it. If you
have some great call-to-action statements utilizing your keyword phrases on
your Web pages, they will probably show up in your snippets at the engines. But
since it's easy enough to create a compelling sentence or 2 that incorporates
your main keyword phrases, you might as well do this for your Meta
descriptions.
Certainly, the more control you have over your listing in the SERPs, the
more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta description tags can help with
that, then it's certainly worth the time to create compelling, keyword-rich
ones.
