SEO Company, SEO Nottingham

How to use the Meta Description tag

The Meta Description tag isn’t there just for the search engines to read, in fact Google pretty much ignores the content in the description tag altogether.

What it should be used for is enticing people to click on your listing in the search engine results. Let’s look at a typical Google search result for this site using the keyword “SEO Company”:

The Meta Description tag is shown in the Google listing, if you are unsure what the code looks like for the description tag then it is shown below:

This mini advert can gain a lot more clicks from search engine results if it’s written well. The best way to write the description is to simply describe your business and include your main keyword(s) within the text.

Any keywords within the Meta Description are automatically made bold which make them more likely to get clicked on by the average searcher.
See the example above for the search “SEO Company”, you can see the keywords are bolded by Google for both the Meta Title tag and the Meta Description tag.

Bing, Yahoo and Ask put more SEO weight upon the Meta Description tag, if you want to rank highly in a competitive market on these search engines then it is essential you optimise the Metas for every key page on your website.

What happens if you don’t use a Meta description tag?

Google ‘plucks’ out related content that is found on the page it’s displaying and uses these “snippets” to create a dynamic description.  Sometimes this is the best option as long-tail keywords will be brought into the description if they are within the text and become bold-type font.  The blog posts here on Real Web SEO don’t use Meta description tags for this very purpose, they can more easily win search results that rarely get searched for.

How long should the Meta description tag be in character length?

Google can hold around 150 characters before the content spills out of the search result boxes and becomes shortened by three dots (…).  There is no actual limit to how long or short the Meta tag can be, if you put in too many characters then expect Google to chose the favorite parts or just the first 150 characters.  A too small description can be a bad thing as you only take up one line in the search results instead of your allotted two; this may be harder to spot by users and will certainly contain less keywords that could be highlighted.

So go ahead and tweak your homepage’s Meta tags, it could make a significant difference.  You can always look at tags from professional websites by viewing their source code, perhaps sticking along the same lines will bring the best results for your site but make sure not to copy them word for word.

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