Forget About All But The Description Meta Tag

There is only one meta tag that most search engines use – the description tag. It is not ordinarily used for SEO ranking purposes, but it is usually used (including by Google) as the text on the search results listing.

Google more often than not uses the description meta tag as the text to show when it displays your website in the search results. We find that it will use this almost 70-80% of the time. The rest of the time it will pick up random text from your home page but usually 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.

The meta tags should appear in the head section of the page between 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 prospective visitors but it will often switch what it uses at will with sometimes it just plucking a piece of text from your page.

To ensure you have more control over what Google selects as the text in the search results as well as setting the description tag carefully also make sure that the first 156 characters of text on your page says what you would like to appear in Google.

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 exhibit 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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