What is Meta Description | Importance of Meta Description Tag in Search Engines

Meta description tag is a hidden HTML tag that allows some search engines to display a description of your site in search results. It allows page authors to say how they would like their pages described when listed by search engines. The Meta description tag is indented to be a brief and concise summary of your page’s content.

Meta description tag contribute to your search engine ranking, and the meta description tag influences the likelihood that a person will actually click on the search engine results page and visit your site. It designed to provide a brief description of your site which can be used by search engines or directories.

The Meta description Tag usually consists of 25 to 30 words or less using no more than 160 to 225 characters total (including spaces). Currently Google displays up to 160 characters, Yahoo! up to 165 and MSN up to 200+. The Meta description also shows up in many search engine results as a summary of your site.

Directories like Yahoo and the ODP (Open Directory Project) show the page title and description that you entered (and the editors modified) on their manual submission form.

For SeoShout.com the Meta description is as;

<meta content=”Search Engine Optimization – Tips & Tricks How to Boost Web Traffic from Search Engines Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.” />

Every page must have a unique Meta description. The Meta description is used by directories, web resources and other webmasters and site owners when they link to your page. If you have a concise and catchy Meta description that really sums up your site’s topic, your site will more readily be reviewed and favored by these sources.

Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn’t very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. Create descriptions that accurately describe each specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and consider using page-level descriptions everywhere else. You should obviously prioritize parts of your site if you don’t have time to create a description for every single page; at the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your homepage and popular pages.

For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one sentence description. For larger database driven sites, like product aggregators, hand written descriptions are more difficult. In the latter case, though, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and is encouraged. Just make sure that

your descriptions are not “spammy.”

Meta descriptions do not guarantee top placement in the search engine ranking pages (SERPS) but they do help.  Since webmasters have abused the use of Meta descriptions over the years to increase their rankings, search engine creators have had to de-emphasize the importance of these tags.  They are still an important factor however since they help people decide whether or not to click through to your website.  When writing your Meta description tags, be sure to write short, concise, relevant, descriptions which entice the user to click through to your website.

Importance of Meta description:

Meta description tag will encourage the searcher to take the next step and visit your Web site.  In essence, a well-written Meta Description Tag will increase the Click Through Rate (CTR) of your organic search listing.

Google and MSN/Bing use it to display the description of a web page in the SERPs. This is a great chance for you to control want searches see when your pages come up in the SERPs.

In less competitive markets it can significantly affect the rankings and in more competitive markets description tag is only good for the description Google displays.

Meta description can be used for Search Engine as a text to be displayed in the SERP’s, which can help increase the number of clicks if done correctly.

Meta description helps that the pages in your site don’t get penalized for duplicate content, as if you had the same description for every page on your site.

Description Tag, Meta Description, On page optimization, Search Engine Optimization, SEO