This is only one man's opinion but interesting...
Search Engines and The Meta
Description Tag
By
Jill Whalen
The keywords and phrases you use in
your Meta description tag don't affect your page's
ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but
this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO
campaigns.
What Is the Meta Description Tag?
The Meta description tag is a snippet
of HTML code that belongs inside the <Head> </Head>
section of a Web page. It usually is placed after the
Title tag and before the Meta keywords tag, although the
order is not important.
The proper syntax for this html tag
is:
<meta name="Description" content="Your descriptive sentence or
two goes here.">
I used to believe that the purpose of
the Meta description tag was twofold: to help the page
rank highly for the words that were contained within it,
as well as to provide a nice description in the search
engine results pages (SERPs). However, today it appears
that, similar to the Meta keywords tag, the information
you place in this tag is *not* given any weïght in the
ranking algorithms of Google, and only a tiny amount of
weïght in Yahoo's.
In other words, whether you use your important keyword phrases
in your Meta description tag or not, it won't affect the position of your page
in the SERPs for the words that are important to you. In fact, you could easily
leave it out altogether. But should you?
Well, if you're already happy with the "snippets" of text that
the search engines post from your page in any given search query, then there's
no reason to have a Meta description tag on your pages. However, it's important
to note that the snippet the engines use will vary, depending on what the
searcher typed into the engine.
Let's take a step back and look at what the search engines
show in the SERPs. It can get a little bit confusing, but if you try out your
own searches in the various engines, you'll have a better idea of what I'm
talking about. The search engines are constantly changing this sort of thing,
plus they all behave in slightly different ways, as you'll see in my examples.
At Google, if you search for a site by URL like this:
www.highrankings.com, the snippet you
see is the first instance of text on the page. Interestingly enough, on my home
page, an image alt attribute tag is the first instance of words "on the page,"
and that's what shows up as part of my "snippet" for this particular search.
(The image is a clickable image, so this jibes with my other theory of Google
indexing the words in the alt attributes of clickable images. See this
forum thread from Dec. 2003.
For this type of search, Yahoo displays the Meta description
info. It's important to note that generally the only people searching using URLs
are site owners trying to see if their pages are indexed. Therefore, you
shouldn't worry too much about what you see under those circumstances.
So let's try something that a real person might search for
when looking for what I have to offer -- how about "SEO copy"?
In Google, my Nitty-gritty handbook page shows up second in
the results with the following snippet:
"techniques: Search engine optimization (SEO) consultants who
need to edit the existing copy of their clients' sites as a matter of course.
..."
Not the best of snippets, to say the least.
In this case, I don't have the phrase "SEO copy" in my Meta
description tag, nor is it anywhere on the page as a complete phrase. Because of
this, Google has simply found instances where the word SEO and the word copy
were near each other, and used the surrounding text as the snippet.
So, if I felt that "SEO copy" was a viable keyword phrase that
people might be searching on, I may want to adjust my page accordingly so that
the phrase appeared in my Meta description tag as well as somewhere in the body
text. Again, this is not because it would help it to rank highly, but because I
would receive a more suitable description that was more in tune with what the
searcher was looking for. One can surmise that they might be more inclined to
clïck on my listing in that case.
Let's look at Yahoo for the same phrase. They've ranked the
page at #3, and used the following snippet:
"Learn SEO copywriting with Jill Whalen's special report --
The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines."
That's a good snippet! Well, guess what? That's my Meta
description tag for that page. Even though the exact phrase wasn't in the tag,
and neither was the word "copy," Yahoo still chose to display it for this search
query. I'm guessing this is because that phrase is actually nowhere on the page,
other than in the Title tag. So with Yahoo, having a decent Meta description tag
was very worthwhile in this instance.
More Tests
I also recently discovered that when I
tested a nonsense word in the Meta description tag of a
page (with the word not appearing elsewhere on the
page), Google did not find it. But when I added the word
to the visible text copy on the page, Google would bring
up the test page when the nonsense word was searched
for. Not only that, but it displayed that part of the
Meta description tag where the nonsense word appeared.
In Yahoo, my nonsense-word test page was found, even if the
word appeared only in the Meta description tag and nowhere else on the page.
Interestingly enough, however, Yahoo didn't display the part of the tag where
the word was placed. They displayed only the beginning of the description, and
cut it off after about 45 words. I purposely placed my nonsense word deep into
my description tag to see if it would get picked up. In this case, the word
appeared as the last of 138 words in the tag. I'll probably add even more words
at some point to see if there's any cutoff point where Yahoo will stop indexing.
Other Engines
I also tested a few searches at Teoma
and MSN. Each engine is slightly different in how they
display the Meta description tag. Teoma seems to find
the words in the tag, but doesn't necessarily display
them. When I searched for a unique sampling of text from
one of my tags, Teoma found the page, but chose to
display the first sentence on the page instead. Not
surprisingly, the current MSN search worked the same as
Yahoo. However,
MSN's search technology prevïew
(which is the new engine they're working on) behaved
similarly to Google on all tests regarding Meta
descriptions.
My new recommendation for this tag is not to worry too much
about it. If you have some great call-to-action statements utilizing your
keyword phrases on your Web pages, they will probably show up in your snippets
at the engines. But since it's easy enough to create a compelling sentence or 2
that incorporates your main keyword phrases, you might as well do this for your
Meta descriptions.
Certainly, the more control you have over your listing in the
SERPs, the more clickthroughs you should see. If your Meta description tags can
help with that, then it's certainly worth the time to create compelling,
keyword-rich ones.
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