One Meta Tag You Should Use Carefully

Many say that meta tags have no influence on your ranking with the search engines. Well that is almost correct except for one ” the description meta tag. Most search engines (including Google) do not in reality take it into account for ranking purposes ” yet ” many use it in their search results.

Google more often than not uses the description meta tag as the text to display when it exhibits your website in the search results. We find that it will use this about 70-80% of the time. The rest of the time it will pick up random text from your home page but commonly it picks up the first 156 characters of text on the page if it does not use the description tag. Make sure your description tags are always 156 characters or less.

To check the length of a piece of text just paste it into a word document and then select the text and then double click the word count box at the bottom of the screen on the status bar.

All meta tags should be at the start of the page inside the head tags.

Google is a little rascal 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 exposed to potential visitors but it will often switch what it uses at will with sometimes it just picking up a piece of text from your page.

If you want to control what Google exhibits then the very first 156 characters of text on a page should be highly controlled because if it does not use the description tag it will use this text.

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 did not 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 selected characters (including spaces).

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 10:07 pm and is filed under internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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