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Description Meta Tag
Description Meta Tag, alone, cannot bring about substantial improvements in page rankings. But, if used alongside other SEO initiatives, it is found to enhance a web page’s position in the search engine result pages markedly. So, it is better not to overlook this innocuous looking tag while designing a web page.
For a common man’s information, the scripting syntax of description Meta tag is < META NAME = “Description” CONTENT = “Description in a couple of sentences”>. The tag appears inside the <head></head> part of the code, after the <title></title> and keyword Meta tag.
The major advantage of using the description Meta tag – assuming that its role in ensuring page rankings is minimal – is that sometimes its contents are picked by the search engines to provide a brief description about the web page in the search results. But, as of now, other than using the description meta tag contents for descriptive purposes, google search algorithm gives virtually no importance to the keyword or arrangement of words inside a description Meta tag nor take it as a criteria for page ranking in the search engine result pages list. In the case of yahoo, even though it considers description Meta tag a bit more than google, still the support is minimal and in no way helpful in determining the page rankings.
Here, it should be understood that filling description Meta tag is not anything compulsory. If your web page is well written (in fact, the most important thing in search engine optimization), it will automatically come in top of search results and search engines might hardly bother to look into what is lying inside the description Meta tag. But, is it advisable to overlook the description Meta tags? Not really!
In other words, it is not a good idea any way to leave description Meta tag empty even though it is not directly influential in deciding the page rankings. The importance of having some worthy contents in the description Meta tag is that the snippets that a search engine picks from a web page for displaying alongside the search results depends a lot on the keyword typed by the user in the search text of the search engine. Depending on the searched keyword, the search engine takes a snippet that is more appropriate, and it looks in other tags if the main body of the web page does not have a suitable description. Here, it must be kept in mind that this behavior is more specific for yahoo search engine that google. But who knows what search engine one may be using? Hence, from the perspective of a web page owner, it is prudent to have all the loop holes covered than taking a chance.
In the case of other search engines – Teoma and MSN for example – the response to description Meta tag contents is almost the same with little variations. For example, Teoma seem to consider the description Meta tag contents, but in no way is using it in search results. MSN, on the other hand, behaves similar to yahoo and uses the text in the description Meta tag to some extent in search results.
To sum it up, description Meta tags can come handy but not always as its influence varies from one search engine to another. At the same time, it is not intelligent either to leave it empty for if some search keyword prompts a search engine to look in the description Meta tag of a particular web page, it will be a costly miss for the web page at the end of the day. Hence, ideally, fill the description Meta tag with one or two compelling sentences containing relevant key phrases and leave everything for chance. One never knows when a search engine stumbles upon the contents of a description Meta tag.
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