Basic Search Engine Optimization – META Description Tag
In this three part series I will describe the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is what is usually included in a website design that claims to be “Search Engine Friendly”. Many website designers will use this term to give the impression that their websites will be indexed and ranked highly by search engines and may not even need SEO in order to rank on search engines such as Google or Yahoo. While these “Search Engine Friendly” websites may indeed be indexed by search engines, they most likely will not rank highly as there are many other factors involved in order to increase search engine ranking. Were this a group of articles on Advanced SEO, this may in fact be a 150 part series which would change every month as search engines update their algorithms.
Nonetheless these three steps are indeed important to SEO, even though they have been used and abused in the past. In today’s post I will focus on the second part of the three parts listed below, the Title Tag. Please note that the three “Tags” discussed below appear within the coding of the website, specifically in the head section.
- Title Tag
- META Description Tag
- META Keyword Tag
As with the Title Tag, for advanced SEO, one would first need to complete a keyword research stage to determine which keywords are the most relevant, bring in the most traffic and convert best. But for this level, keyword research is not necessary.
The META Description Tag is the second most important item in the <head> section of your website page after the title tag. The META Description Tag is used for several purposes:
- To tell the search engine what your website page is about.
- To give the search engine a snippet of text to display in its search engine results.
- To entice visitors searching on a search engine to visit your website.
The META Description Tag should consist of a group of words which describe the content of a website page. A different description should be used for each page on your website. Most commonly it is best to take a snippet of text from within the page and use it in the META Description Tag, however sometimes you may wish to prime it so that potential visitors are enticed to view your website to obtain further information.
Without a META Description Tag in place, a search engine will most commonly scan your website page and chose the first sentence from either the first or second paragraph of that page. Therefore it is often best practice to always include a META Description Tag to be sure that a search engine provides the most accurate description.
For example when searching in Google for pages indexed for my website, Semtek, for the keyword phrase “Search Engine Marketing”, the following results are displayed: http://www.google.com.hk/search?hl=en&q=search+engine+marketing+site:semtek.net&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
Semtek provide you with high quality, search engine friendly webdesigns. We specialise in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) through Search Engine Optimisation …
As you can see from this snippet of text which is provided in the META Description Tag, a clear description is given on what Semtek offers in regards to the search term “Search Engine Marketing”. Also note that it is highly important to include keywords which are of relevance in the META Description Tag as they will be further bolded in search engines. In this example from Google search results you can see that “Search Engine Marketing” appears bolded once, and “search engine” is bolded twice. This draws extra attention to the listing and therefore extra relevance as it appears that the listing is highly relevant to the search term entered in the search box, “Search Engine Marketing”. This also applies to the Title Tag, which as you can see also has the keyword phrase “Search Engine Marketing” in bold for effect.
The META Description Tag helps you by making your website appear more relevant over other websites in search engine results, much like the Title Tag. Therefore it is very important to include this tag when building your website so that your website page is portrayed correctly in search engine results. To include the most commonly searched for keywords and those keywords which convert the most into either interested visitors or paying customers is also highly important, but this moves more into advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) where keyword research is conducted to determine what these keywords are.
