Posted on: - by Robyn Smith
What is the Meta Description Tag?
The meta description tag is a HTML attribute that can be individually assigned to each page on a website.
They are readable by search engines and displayed in SERPs (search engine results pages) as snippets to describe the content or theme of that particular web page.
How is the Meta Description Tag used?
The meta description tag is used to describe the content or theme of a page, as mentioned above.
The best way to view the meta description tag is as a sort of free advertisement when you happen to appear in SERPs. Although it isn’t crawled for keywords, any words in you description that match the search query you are appearing for will be bolded, indicating the relevance of your page to the query.
For this reason, it is handy to accurately describe your page with appropriate keywords that are relevant to your industry. Of course, do not keyword stuff your meta description as it will do nothing for you except highlight to the audience that you are spamming.
What does the Meta Description Tag look like?
Here is an example of the HMTL code used for writing meta description tags:
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”This is the text that will show up in SERPs. You can put anything you like here, but keep it relevant. ”
</head>
Here’s what our meta description for the Serchen.com homepage looks like in Google (it’s 150 characters including spaces):
How do search engines look at the Meta Description Tag?
Search engines do not take into account any keywords in your meta description, so including them for reasons other than accurately describing the page, is pointless.
It’s important to note that search engines will not always use the meta description as the snippet in SERPs. If a different piece of text from your website is more related to the search query, that text may be used in place of the meta description.
If you see this happening it could be a sign that your meta description is not specific or relevant enough to the page and you can consider changing it, although this is not necessary if you don’t see it as a problem.
Also try and avoid using symbols and non-alpha/numeric as search engines, Google in particular, has been known to ignore things like quotation marks.
How long should the Meta Description Tag be?
There is no strict character limit for a meta description tag, however, the ideal length of them is determined by each individual search engine. If a search engine uses your meta description and it’s too long it will cut off the excess words with an ellipsis (…). To avoid this happening, the following lengths (including spaces) are recommended:
Google – Around 150 – 160 characters (Thought to be 156)
Bing – Between 25 and 150 characters
Yahoo! – 161 characters maximum
See also: Quick Guides: Page Titles & H1 Tags
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