One Meta Tag You Should Use Carefully
November 19, 2009 by David Anttony
Filed under Internet marketing
There is only one meta tag that most search engines use – the description tag. It is not normally used for SEO ranking purposes, but it is normally used (including by Google) as the text on the search results listing.
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.
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 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 exposed to possible visitors but it will often vary 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 pictures 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 choose 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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