The meta-description tag is placed between the tags in your
HTML page. Its purpose is to provide a brief synopsis of page content,
which builds on the headline included in the title tags. The correct syntax
is as follows:
Most of the meta tags on a page carry very little SEO value. Search
engines in general (and Google in particular) have paid less and less
attention to them over time, because so many webmasters abuse them
and their content is not actually displayed on the page. Arguably, several
are even counterproductive, in that they make a page longer (and reduce
both density and crawl efficiency) without adding any value. As such,
you may see comments around the forums that the meta-description tag
isn’t that important. In some ways these comments are correct, if SEO
is all you are focusing on.
seo-meta-description secret tips seo meta description
However, in fact the meta-description tag is very important for the following two (not strictly SEO) reasons:
Snippet compilation. When Google creates search engine results
pages, it may use the description tag in constructing the “call to
action” snippet that appears below the results link. While this is
more internet marketing than true SEO, I dedicate a whole section
to the important area of SERPs and snippets.
Directory submission. Some directory services pick up and use
your page meta description as the description of your entry in
their directory listings. This applies to both human-edited and
some more automated directory services.
Good practices for description meta tags
• 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 webpage” or “Page about baseball
cards”
• filling the description with only keywords
• copy and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta tag
• 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 (e.g. searches using the site: operator). 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
