How to use META Description Tags

Don't know anything about SEO? SEO can be very confusing and the best of people can get bemused about it. Not to worry, we are here to explain in more in depth and help you out on this topic.

SEO is one of the most important things you can do when creating a new website. Search Engine Optimization or SEO in short is used to bring more traffic to your website through search engines. The more SEO you do for your website, the higher search engines will rank your page and the more page hits your website will receive.

Search Engines are kinda like phone directories like The Yellow Pages. Like The Yellow Pages these Search Engines categorize each website an making sure that the websites are correctly sorted. Then when someone searches for your website, product or service, they will come up with your name and website and you will be able to supply them

The good ol' Yellow Pages

In this article we will talk about META description tags and what each of them do and why you need to use them. People often get confused between META description tags and META keywords. META keywords are keywords that are used to describe the site. META keywords used to be used in SEO but now they are no longer used by Google. A META description tag in HTML is the 160 character snippet used to summarize a website's content. Search Engines use META descriptions in search engin results to let users know what the website is about. For example online auction site eBay's meta description is;

"Buy and sell electronics, cars, fashion apparel, collectables, sporting goods, digital cameras, baby items, vouchers, and everything else on eBay"

The META description used for eBay details everything that eBay do and all the main things you can find on eBay such as 'electronics', 'cars', 'digital cameras' and 'vouchers', at the end it says 'and everything else on eBay'. This means that eBay have and sell near enough anything and that you can buy anything and everything from eBay.

If your website is for instance, about heavy metal music, your META description would be something like;

"Get all the information you want about all the top heavy metal bands and music. Find the artist and album you are looking for and listen to songs for free."

As you can see from this description the words 'heavy metal' have been inserted into the description as this is one of the primary keywords that people would use. Other words such as 'music' , 'artist' and 'album' have also been included while at the end it states all songs can be listen to for free.

It is compulsory to use a META description tag because it gives users an insight into the website and the user can read a little summary about the website and find out more about it. This little paragraph may be the difference between the user clicking on your website or not. In the META description you should insert keywords into the paragraph while ensuring not to go overboard on using too many.

Think of the META description as an advertisement for your website and you have to sell your website and tell people what it is about. What would you write about your site? How would you describe your website? These are both very good questions and you should know the answer to them. The META description is the thing that people read in the Search engine result page or SERP and use to judge whether a site is worthy of clicking on or not. When writing your META description make sure you use your primary keywords and include them into the META description. Also try to include action verbs that will make your readers want to do it. For example; include words like read, do, learn, move, run, etc. Including words like these will make the reader want to do it, its like a magic trick.

Avoid using too many keywords and the same words and trying to stuff it in all together without it making coherent sense. Read through what you have written for the META description, if it doesn't make sense to you then how is it going to make sense to someone else reading it.

Keep in mind that META descriptions have nothing to do with whether your website is ranked higher in search engines like Google and search engines completely disregard META description tags when considering the ranking of a website. Check out this article by Google and it tells you all about it.

However it isn't always necessary to write a META description tag for your website. If you don't write a META description tag for your website then the search engines will just extract the best keywords from your website that describe your site and use them. This isn't usually a bad thing either. Normally we use this rule to judge whether to implement META tags or not. If the article contains less than four keywords than it is wise to use META tags, if you have more than four keywords then it is best to let it go with the search engine and leave out the META tags.

We hope you have found this article useful and if you need any more help or would like to add your thoughts about META descriptions and SEO, please comment. Thank you for taking the time to read this article.


For more information on META descriptions please go to W3Schools