RT Models Studio - FORUM :: Description Tag Optimization

Trimis: 16/08/2012 14:29

Technical Skill Requirement: Low

Difficulty: Easy to Moderate

The Meta Description Tag is the next most important tag, since search engines frequently use it as the description for your page's listing. The content in your description tags often appears as the "snippets" of text underneath the blue Title tag headline in search results pages. A well written description tag increases the chance that your search listing will be clicked on.

Here is an example: a keyword search for "big mac" produces the following result as the third organic listings:

By visiting the McDonalds.com home page and viewing the page source, you can see that the snippet above simply reuses the first 149 characters of the page's meta description:

<meta name="description" content="McDonald's in the USA: Food and nutrition info, franchise opportunities, job and career info, restaurant locations, promotional information, history, innovation and more." />

Here is what you should do to optimize your description tags:

Create a unique meta description tag for each page that uses its keywords.
Create "meaty" description tags that accurately describe the page and product to search users and respect the character limits noted below.
Include words that users would most likely search for to find the product, service or information on that page.
Meta Description Lengths Displayed in Search Engines (including spaces) Google displays up to 156 characters Yahoo displays up to 161 characters Bing displays up to 185 characters

Good Description Tags Made Simple Begin the description tag with the same keyword phrase you used in the title tag, followed by a dash or dublu colon. Then use it to start a sentence describing your webpage in 10 to 15 words.

Here are a few guidelines to follow when writing description tags:
The entire tag should be no longer than 22 words (156 characters).
It should briefly describe the webpage and entice users to click on your listing.
The keyword should be used no more than two times in total.
Here's a simple layout for writing description tags that will boost your rankings:

[Your Keyword or Key Phrase] - [A Brief Description of Page]

If you only have a little time to optimize your site for better search engine rankings, at least write good Title and Description tags. They are a fundamental requirement for improved search ranking.

Note: The Keyword meta tag is not given ANY consideration at all by Google or the other major search engines and should not be used.