Answers to some of the thousands of questions asked by marketing executives who attended the AMA's first free Web seminar, "Why Can't My CEO Find Our Website??"
Though meta description tags are not a major factor search engines consider when ranking sites, they should not be left off the page. Both the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag contribute to your search engine ranking. A meta description tag is supposed to be a brief and concise summary of your page's content. Think of the Yahoo! or LookSmart directory. You see your site title followed by a brief description of your site or business. The meta description tag is designed to provide a brief description of your site which can be used by search engines or directories. The meta description tag takes the following form:
<meta name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of your page.">
When you write a meta description tag, you should limit it to 170 characters or 200 characters at most. You should pick a style and be consistent throughout your pages, writing a unique description for each page of your site. LookSmart offers a detailed guide to writing descriptions through their volunteer directory, Zeal. Click here and learn about the LookSmart description style. The Open Directory (DMOZ) also offers a detailed guide to writing descriptions. Click here to learn about the DMOZ style. The key is that you want your description to adhere to W3C standards and be relevant to the content of the page. Again, it is intended to provide a brief summary of the contents of the page.
The meta description tag is used by Alltheweb.com, which provides search results to Lycos. Inktomi indexes the meta description tag and shows your description in the search results on search sites which use Inktomi's data. The meta description tag is also used by AltaVista in its search results in many cases, depending on whether the description is a good match for and includes the specific search querry.
To learn more about meta tags in general, visit What are meta tags?
For more technical information about meta tags, visit The global structure of an HTML document - W3C Recommendation. Also see Performance, Implementation, and Design Notes - W3C Recommendation.
Use our free Meta Tag Generator to build meta tags for your site. If you've already created your meta tags, use our free Meta Tag Grabber to check them.
