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Meta Tag Description

The meta tag with the page description offers Google and other search engines a brief symmary of the topic. The title of the page usually contains a few words or a phrase, but the meta description can contain a few sentences or a short paragraph. The Google Webmaster Tools include a handy section for content analysis. Here you can see where meta tags descriptions are too long or too short or too common. The meta description is placed afther the <head> tag in your HTML document.

 

An example of this page: 

<html>
<head>
<title>Meta Tag Description</title>
<meta name="description" content="The Meta Tag "description" is important because they appear in the results of Google. Make sure you use a catchy text." />
<meta name="keywords" content="metatag, description, seo, google" />
</head>
<body>
...

The metatag description of this page, with a brief overview about this page.

 

Meta tags with descriptions are important because Google can use them as snippets for your pages. This is not standard, because Google can also use a relevant part of the visible text of your site that matches a user's query. Google also uses the description for your site from the Open Directory Project as your site is displayed there. It is always a good idea to add meta descriptions to your pages in case Google could not find good text in the text fragment to use. The Webmaster Central blog has an informative message about improving fragments with better meta tags for descriptions.

 

It looks like this in your browser. 

Meta Tag description Google Search

A user searches for Joomla seo tools.



Meta Tag Description Google results

This page is one of the results displayed, where the meta description of the page is used as snippet.


The keywords appear in bold in the results. This applies to the Title, Meta Description and the URL. This allows the user to quickly see if the content of the page matches where he or she is looking for. 

Practical tips for the Meta Tag Description

Give an accurate summary of the contents of the page: Write a description that would inform and intrest users if they see this snippet in the search result.

Avoid: 

  • A meta tag with a description that is unrelated to the content of the page
  • A general description such as: 'My homepage' or 'Page about SEO'
  • Just putting keywords in the description
  • Copy the content of the page into the meta tag description
Use a unique meta tag descriptions for each page: if each page has its own tag with description, Google helps you and your users, especially when queries involving multiple pages of your domain are displayed (eg via the operator "site:"). If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, it is probably not easy to manually create a different description for every page. In that case, you can automatically generate different meta tags with descriptions based on the content of each page.
Avoid: 
  • One meta tag description that is used for all pages on your site.
 
 

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