A page's description
meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about.
Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description
meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph. Google Webmaster
Tools provides a handy content
analysis section that'll
tell you about any description meta tags that are either too short, long, or duplicated
too many times (the same information is also shown for <title> tags).
Like the <title> tag, the description meta tag is placed within the
<head> tag of your HTML document.
Description meta tags
are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages.
Note that we say
"might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your
page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query.
Alternatively, Google might use your site's description in the Open Directory Project if your site is listed
there (learn how to prevent search engines from displaying ODP data). Adding description meta tags to each of your pages is always
a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in
the snippet. The Webmaster Central Blog has an informative post on improving
snippets with better description meta tags. Snippets
appear under a page's title and above a page's URL in a search result.
Words in the snippet are bolded when
they appear in the user's query. This gives the user clues about whether the
content on the page matches with what he or she is looking for. Below is another
example, this time showing a snippet from a description meta tag on a deeper
page (which ideally has its own unique description meta tag) containing an
article.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment