Saturday, May 24, 2014

SEO for Meta Description

Use Description Meta Tag for SEO

Description meta tag of a page gives the summary of your page content to every search engines. As we discussed, a Page title may be of few words within which it may not be possible to define a summary of your content, whereas description meta tag might be a bit longer in length having few sentences or a short paragraph. Description meta tag is placed within the <head> tag of a HTML document as shown:


Description Meta tag is shown in Search Results

Generally search engines show the description meta tag of a page in search results which helps user to understand about your page content. If you used very short description then few lines from your page content is also shown along with meta description. The search query is highlighted in all the part of search results.
Meta Desc Display in Google Search
Meta Desc Display in Google Search
Note sometimes instead of meta description search engines may use a snippet of your content or description of your site from web directories like DMOZ based on the search query matching.

How do I check issues in Description meta Tags of my Website?

Google Webmaster Tools provides an analysis which tells you the various issues of your meta tag like short description, long description and duplicated meta tags. To check, login to your Google Webmaster Tools account and navigate to HTML improvements section under Optimization. 
Meta Description Improvements in Google Webmaster Tools
Meta Description Improvements in Google Webmaster Tools

Dos and Don't with Description Meta Tag

Dos
Dos
  • Write a description which will increase the user interest to check your site when they see your description in the search results
  • Unique description for each page informs both the search engines as well the users about each of your pages
  • When multiple pages of your site are shown in a single search result page, users will ignore the important page if all the description are same
  • Use auto description meta tag generation methods based on page content if your site has many pages
Picture
Don'ts
  • Unrelated description meta tag to the content of a page
  • Generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about greeting cards"
  • Description stuffed only with keywords
  • Single description for all or most of the pages
  • Inserting the whole content of a page into the description meta tag

 

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