In my last post I touched on some of the factors that make Title Tags such an important part of your on page SEO strategy. Today I will examine in more depth the importance of Meta Description Tags an important but not essential on page SEO element you should think about when you are organising your sites pages.
Meta Description
In terms of pure SEO value Meta tags don’t carry the same weight of importance as what page title tags do. Over the years Search Engines have downgraded their importance because people used to abuse the role that they played. Back in the day Webmasters loved nothing more than cramming the meta description tags full of content and full of keywords. This really didn’t serve them too much purpose though as all it did was make a page longer and harder to index by the search engines. Keyword stuffing was so apparent in meta descriptions that all the major search engines started to play down the importance of them over time.
Today the meta description is still an important feature to use though as it acts as an attraction mechanism to entice users to click on your link in the SERP. The content written in a meta description should be the most concise and accurate snippet of what a page on your website is about. Google only allows 160 characters of the meta description to be displayed in the SERP’s. There is not much point in having a meta description that exceeds this limit because they simply wont be displayed in Google’s search engine results. Any characters that exceed that limit wont be displayed at all.
Having any keywords placed in the meta description will show up in bold in a SERP if a user searches on those terms. This in turn can help you achieve more clicks. If you have both a strong title tag and meta description displayed in the SERP, this can enhance your website click-through rate considerably. Combined they both serve as a call to action to entice a user to click on to your website.
The meta description tag is placed between the <head> tags in a HTML page. The syntax looks exactly like this:
<meta name=”description” content= “meta description content goes in here”/>
When it comes to placing keywords in your meta description the best standard of practice would be to place your primary keywords within the 160 character limit. Although from a pure SEO value perspective placing your keywords in the meta description has been downgraded by search engines, there is no harm in keeping with good habits.
Next week I will talk in depth about the significance of meta keyword tags and the important role they play in on page optimization.
This wbieste makes things hella easy.