Many say that meta tags have no effect on your ranking with the search engines. Well that is nearly true except for one ” the description meta tag. Almost all search engines (including Google) do not in reality take it into account for ranking purposes ” yet ” many use it in their search results.
The content of the description tag is used more often than not by Google when it displays the results pages for a keyword. It uses only the first 156 characters though so make sure if you are using it to check the length of the text. If you do not check the length your text will be truncated and it will look funny.
So when you use a good description and a search engine uses it then it will help your click through rate. If your description is attractive people will click though more.
All meta tags should be at the start of the page inside the head tags.
Google is a little rogue when it comes to using or not using the meta description tag. When it does use it you can have full control of what is displayed to possible visitors but it will often change what it uses at will with sometimes it just plucking a piece of text from your webpage.
To make sure you have more control over what Google selects as the text in the search results as well as setting the description tag carefully also make sure that the first 156 characters of text on your page says what you would like to appear in Google.
If you have a flash site or just use images with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and display this when it didn’t select to use our description tag. This will tell you to ALWAYS have some text on your page even if it is only 156 carefully chosen characters (including spaces).
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