Technology Networking & Internet

What Goes in a Meta Tag Description?

By Technology Last updated Sunday, May/12/2024

Meta Description Tag

Add a meta description tag to the HTML code of a Web page by inserting the following code between the <head> and </head> tags of the page:

<meta name="description" content="">

Place the desired description between the two quotation marks after the word "content." Note that browsers and search engines will not read the meta description if you place the code in the <body> section of the page.

When you search for content online, a search engine generally displays a small block of text after each title on the results page. This text is intended to give the searcher an idea of what she might find if she clicks that result. In many cases, the text that appears on a search results page is that page's meta description tag. Therefore, the meta description tag should summarize as best as possible what a Web page is about.

Think of the meta tag as a way for you to "pre-sell" your content. When you search the Web, you probably read the text after the titles on the results pages before clicking any links; your readers will do the same. Therefore, you should write appealing descriptions that make potential readers want to click through to your website. In addition, it is wise to try to write the meta description for a Web page using the keywords that someone searching for that content would be likely to use. A search engine may not display the meta description on search results pages if a different section of the page contains keywords that the search engine determines relate more strongly to the term searched for.

Keyword density is an important aspect of search engine optimization; if you want a page to rank well on search engines for a certain keyword phrase, that phrase should appear at least once in the page's content. Increasing the number of times that a keyword phrase appears may increase search engine rankings for that phrase. In the past, search engines used the meta description tag of a Web page when determining its relevance for certain keyword phrases. However, some webmasters abused this by using the meta description tag as a way to "stuff" a Web page with many unrelated keyword phrases to increase search engine rankings. Today, search engine algorithms rarely consider the meta description tag when determining a page's relevance for keywords. So, while the meta description tag may help your readers, it will not help your search engine rankings.