Search Engines and The Meta Description Tag
By Jill Whalen
The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag
don't affect your page's ranking in the search engines (for the
most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall
SEO campaigns.
What Is the Meta Description Tag?
The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that belongs
inside the <Head> </Head> section of a Web page. It usually is
placed after the Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag,
although the order is not important.
The proper syntax for this HTML tag is:
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Your descriptive sentence or
two goes here.">
I used to believe that the purpose of the Meta description tag
was twofold: to help the page rank highly for the words that were
contained within it, as well as to provide a nice description in
the search engine results pages (SERPs). However, today it
appears that, similar to the Meta keywords tag, the information
you place in this tag is *not* given any weight in the ranking
algorithms of Google, and only a tiny amount of weight in
Yahoo's.
In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases
in your Meta description tag or not, it won't affect the position
of your page in the SERPs for the words that are important to
you. In fact, you could easily leave it out altogether. But
should you?
Well, if you're already happy with the "snippets" of text that
the search engines post from your page in any given search query,
then there's no reason to have a Meta description tag on your
pages. However, it's important to note that the snippet the
engines use will vary, depending on what the searcher typed into
the engine.
Let's take a step back and look at what the search engines show
in the SERPs. It can get a little bit confusing, but if you try
out your own searches in the various engines, you'll have a
better idea of what I'm talking about. The search engines are
constantly changing this sort of thing, plus they all behave in
slightly different ways, as you'll see in my examples.
At Google, if you search for a site by URL like this:
www.highrankings.com, the snippet you see is the first instance
of text on the page. Interestingly enough, on my home page, an
image alt attribute tag is the first instance of words "on the
page," and that's what shows up as part of my "snippet" for this
particular search. (The image is a clickable image, so this
jibes with my other theory of Google indexing the words in the
alt attributes of clickable images. See this forum thread from
Dec. 2003:
.)
For this type of search, Yahoo displays the Meta description
info. It's important to note that generally the only people
searching using URLs are site owners trying to see if their
pages are indexed. Therefore, you shouldn't worry too much about
what you see under those circumstances.
So let's try something that a real person might search for when
looking for what I have to offer -- how about "SEO copy"?
In Google, my Nitty-gritty handbook page shows up second in the
results with the following snippet:
"... techniques: Search engine optimization (SEO) consultants
who need to edit the existing copy of their clients' sites as a
matter of course. ..."
Not the best of snippets, to say the least.
In this case, I don't have the phrase "SEO copy" in my Meta
description tag, nor is it anywhere on the page as a complete
phrase. Because of this, Google has simply found instances where
the word SEO and the word copy were near each other, and used
the surrounding text as the snippet.
Now, if I felt that "SEO copy" was a viable keyword phrase that
people might be searching on, I may want to adjust my page
accordingly so that the phrase appeared in my Meta description
tag as well as somewhere in the body text. Again, this is not
because it would help it to rank highly, but because I would
receive a more suitable description that was more in tune with
what the searcher was looking for. One can surmise that they
might be more inclined to click on my listing in that case.
Let's look at Yahoo for the same phrase. They've ranked the page
at #3, and used the following snippet:
"Learn SEO copywriting with Jill Whalen's special report -- The
Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines."
Now that's a good snippet! Well, guess what? That's my Meta
description tag for that page. Even though the exact phrase
wasn't in the tag, and neither was the word "copy," Yahoo still
chose to display it for this search query. I'm guessing this is
because that phrase is actually nowhere on the page, other than
in the Title tag. So with Yahoo, having a decent Meta description
tag was very worthwhile in this instance.
More Tests
I also recently discovered that when I tested a nonsense word in
the Meta description tag of a page (with the word not appearing
elsewhere on the page), Google did not find it. But when I added
the word to the visible text copy on the page, Google would bring
up the test page when the nonsense word was searched for. Not
only that, but it displayed that part of the Meta description
tag where the nonsense word appeared.
In Yahoo, my nonsense-word test page was found, even if the word
appeared only in the Meta description tag and nowhere else on the
page. Interestingly enough, however, Yahoo didn't display the
part of the tag where the word was placed. They displayed only
the beginning of the description, and cut it off after about 45
words. I purposely placed my nonsense word deep into my
description tag to see if it would get picked up. In this case,
the word appeared as the last of 138 words in the tag. I'll
probably add even more words at some point to see if there's any
cutoff point where Yahoo will stop indexing.
Other Engines
I also tested a few searches at Teoma and MSN. Each engine is
slightly different in how they display the Meta description
tag. Teoma seems to find the words in the tag, but doesn't
necessarily display them. When I searched for a unique sampling
of text from one of my tags, Teoma found the page, but chose to
display the first sentence on the page instead. Not surprisingly,
the current MSN search worked the same as Yahoo. However, MSN's
search technology preview (http://techpreview.search.msn.com/)
(which is the new engine they're working on) behaved similarly
to Google on all tests regarding Meta descriptions.
My new recommendation for this tag is not to worry too much
about it. If you have some great call-to-action statements
utilizing your keyword phrases on your Web pages, they will
probably show up in your snippets at the engines. But since it's
easy enough to create a compelling sentence or 2 that
incorporates your main keyword phrases, you might as well do
this for your Meta descriptions.
Certainly, the more control you have over your listing in the
SERPs, the more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta
description tags can help with that, then it's certainly worth
the time to create compelling, keyword-rich ones.
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Jill Whalen of High Rankings is an internationally recognized
search engine optimization (http://www.highrankings.com/)
consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings Advisor
search engine marketing newsletter
(http://www.highrankings.com/advisor.htm).
She specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations
and seminars. Jill's handbook, "The Nitty-gritty of Writing for
the Search Engines" (http://www.highrankings.com/seo-writing.htm)
teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword
phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and
gain high rankings in the major search engines.
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