The description is the actual text that is displayed under the title in search results. This tag is your first chance to reinforce keywords found in your title while at the same time allowing you the opportunity to make a statement that actually draws Internet searchers into your website. The description tag has very little ranking power but can add to keywords and phrases that match inbound link text and titles.
Like the title tag, the description tag is limited to no more than 149 characters long including spaces.
Though not very long, these 149 characters do allow for some flexibility in what is stated in the description tag. This tag should include keywords when they make sense. However, the best use for this tag is to increase the click through rates of the pages it is on. Description tags that entice the searcher into wanting to know more about your website tend to send more searchers into a website than one that makes little sense at all because it is stuffed with nonsensical keywords and phrases.
The following was at one time my website meta description.
Affordable SEO Services | Small Business Web Site Internet Marketing | SEO Services Every Small Business Can Afford | SEO Service @ $199.00 | SEO Training
Affordable SEO Services: Key worded phrase that matches my title.
Small Business Web Site Internet Marketing: A popular searched for phrase that describes what I do.
SEO Services Every Small Business Can Afford: A call to action phrase that again ties to the title and the beginning of the description.
SEO Service @ $199.00: Teaser phrase that answers the question “How affordable?”
SEO Training: I had to sneak that in.
The pipes ( | ) are in the description as a way to segment the different phrases in the description. This is done more as a way to draw attention to the individual phrases within the title. These are no longer in my description tag.
Something I have discovered in an experiment, I wrote several descriptions for the same page, all of which were included in the description tag. Each description was unique to a closely related set of keywords or phrases. These keywords and phrases came from actual search data that my analytics showed as sending people to my site. The idea was to see if Google would display these alternate descriptions when those search phrases were searched for. That is exactly what happened.
I wrote six different descriptions, less than 149 characters long each separated by a hyphen ( – ) and found in several cases that those alternate descriptions would be displayed in the description of the search results for the keywords and phrases that I had chosen to target. This discovery provided an opportunity to control the description that is displayed in the search results when the searched for phrase is not actually on the page that is returned in the search results. Search phrases that match words or phrases that are actually on your website will commonly be pulled into the description that is displayed in the search results.
The actual description that Google displays is up to Google. My experiment with additional descriptions provides an opportunity to control this important text for readability and click through rates. I have no knowledge of any ranking benefits from adding additional descriptions. I did see that Google would piece together snippets from the different descriptions which allows for even greater flexibility in what text appears in the description tag.
A trend with some website owners is to leave the description tag empty. Technically, there is nothing wrong with this as long as you don’t mind Google piecing the description together from text on the page for you. Google will ignore some or all of the description text if the search phrase you are ranking for is found on the webpage itself and not in the description tag. These snippets of short text or phrases can and will vary from one search engine to another.
I would recommend having more description than you need over not having any description at all. Very Important: Never duplicate the same description on different pages on your website. A common reason for web pages not being indexed is duplicate titles or descriptions.
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Nashville SEO, Google Places and Social Media Marketing. Serving small businesses in Nashville, Franklin, Brentwood Tennessee and every city across the US and Canada!
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