SEO basics part 3: The Meta description tag in html
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After adding a Title tag to your web site, the next step to consider while optimizing your site for search engines is adding a meta description tag. This tag’s function, as the name implies, is adding a description to your site or individual page. Although there is currently discussion among webmasters about if meta tags are as important these days for SEO as they where in the past, they are still used in search engines like Yahoo! where the meta description tag becomes the actual description that lies underneath the title in the search engine results page, others for example, Google put little or even no weight on the meta description tag for indexing and ranking still it does appear on the search engines results page.
A poorly chosen meta description tag can easily turn visitors away form even entering your page or site so choose your description wisely as your web site’s description should persuade web surfers to enter. It is recommended, as with the title tag, that your description tag incorporates some of your keywords or phrases included in the meta keywords tag . the recommended maximum amount of characters is around 200 to 250 characters more than this is generally not recommended again for displaying purposes. Remember the main idea when writing your meta description tag is to grab in some way people’s attention.
A meta description tag in html is as follows:
<meta name=”description” content=”Your Text Here”>
To insert your meta description tag Find the opening head tag and insert it after the opening head tag and before the closing head tag just like when inserting a title tag in your source code.
<head>
<title>Your site name or page name</title>
<meta name=”description” content=”Your Text Here”>
</head>
You can use a meta description tag to:
- describe the content of your site or page
- make a commercial offer or announce a discount price
- give a small personal opinion on a particular page or site
- remember the most important use for the meta description tag is to grab attention and persuade
These are just some of the most common uses for meta description tags. Use your creativity always and experiment with different description tags to see which ones are better at driving traffic to your web site, sometimes it is just a matter of trial and error.
Posts you might also like:
- SEO basics part 2 The title tag in html
- 8 Basic tips to rank better for your keywords
- SEO Basics Part 5: No Follow Tags
- Long Tail Keywords: SEO Urban Legend or Buried Diamonds?
- Seo basics part 4: Site navigation
- SEO basics part 1 Introduction to search engine optimization
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http://making-living-online.blogspot.com/ said:
this is great info for anyone new to seo or just refreshing their nowledge meta tags play a huge role in google ranking in general. Every site you have should be optimized and meta tags are an easy way to do so.
July 10th, 2009 at 2:18 pm -
it certification said:
This knowledge will be essential for me because im new in seo. Thanks for sharing good knowledge.
May 30th, 2009 at 3:00 am
