In the last part of this course we talked about the title meta tag and its importance in the process of SEO. Today we move to another interesting meta tag which is the Description meta tag.
Summaries can be defined for each page
A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google Webmaster Tools provides a handy content analysis section that'll tell you about any description meta tags that are either too short, long, or duplicated too many times (the same information is also shown for <title> tags). Like the <title> tag, the description meta tag is placed within the <head> tag of your HTML document.
Example:
<html>
<head>
<title>Technology to brain</titles>
<head>
<title>Technology to brain</titles>
<meta name="description" content="Techno2brain.com provides a large selection of technology news and computing tricks, we also offer a lot of strategies to earn money online"/>
</head>
</html>
</head>
</html>
What are the merits of description meta tags?
Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets (Text displayed beneath the title of a corresponding web page on the search results pages of a search engine. A web page summary and/or parts of the page that match the search keywords will be displayed.) for your pages. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Alternatively, Google might use your site's description in the Open Directory Project (a list of Internet links collected on a large scale and then organized by category) if your site is listed there.
Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet. The Webmaster Central Blog has an informative post on improving snippets with better description meta tags.
Words in the snippet are bolded when they appear in the user's query :
Words in the snippet are bolded when they appear in the user's query :
This gives the user clues about whether the content on the page matches with what he or she is looking for.
Hereinafter another example, this time showing a snippet from a description meta tag on a deeper page (which ideally has its own unique description meta tag) containing an article:
Best Practices:
1- Accurately summarize the page's content
Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.
Avoid:
- writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
- using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about baseball cards"
- filling the description with only keywords
- copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag
2- Use unique descriptions for each page:
Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain. If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn't feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page's content.
Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain. If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn't feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page's content.
Avoid:
- using a single description meta tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages
See you in the next part of this course which titled: Improve the structure of your URLs
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