Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag

Meta tags used to have such bad rep. Before the 1990’s, meta tags were trustworthy elements of a webpage. They were there to provide page information for surfers. They served as tool to help search engines (SE) categorize sites for rankings. Surely, life was less complicated then.

After a while, or about the mid 90’s, webmasters saw a formula brewing: right meta element plus high ranking equals high traffic to the website. That was almost synonymous with commercial success. A frenzy of legitimate and not-so-legitimate means of improving one’s website traffic ensued. Keyword stuffing and spam indexing became major headaches of SEs. It didn’t take long for SEs to realize that keywords in meta were often misleading, unreliable, and lead to spam sites. Thus, the race for the creation of sophisticated SE spiders (robots) was conceived. Spiders crawl and index pages according to what links they can follow or what links lead to spam sites. Most SEs now support these.

Although meta tag description is still a great fall back measure for site categorization, most SEs hardly rely on it anymore, thereby giving meta tags only moderate importance in the ranking attributes. They are usually inserted into an HTML header, although not often visible to a user visiting the site.

A meta description tag provide a concise account of webpage’s content. It allows web builders to give a more meaningful description for listings than what might be displayed in the search engine results page (SERP). The description is often, but not always, displayed on SERPs, so it can impact click-through rates (CTR). Nowadays, meta seems more utilized for CTR or click-through. This helps make your listings look more appealing, or at least makes them deserve a glance.

Well thought of and well written meta description is still being used by many smaller directories and engines. Sometimes, meta descriptions all read the same. So if you are thinking of writing a meta description for your page (and you should), try to make it interesting and unique – enough to make the SEs pull snippets of your work from the dowdy pack. They will look great if it comes out in the SERP. If you have a site with multiple pages, try using unique description on each and every one of them – instead of having one generic description or worse, no description at all. Try to use different words for the page title and meta tag; repetitiveness may sometimes be good, but it doesn’t work in this case.

And don’t cheat, you spammer! Whatever you are so eloquently and eruditely describing, make sure that it’s actually IN the page with your meta tag. Unique doesn’t have to mean schlock; a good description can make you - just as a bad description can kill your page.

Remember, an interesting read is always an interesting read, even if it IS just a header for your page.

A note of concern: because there are no gatekeepers in the World Wide Web, no editors, no guardians against plagiarism, a “unique” meta description can easily be copied. Try to keep your site up-to-date (an easy enough task), and try to avoid keyword duplication issues. If you need to change your title and meta description, do so. Both elements are important for CTR.

If your page is not exactly five to 12 years old, and is not considered one of the trusted sites, meta description tags may help you, if not with the page rankings in SERP, then at least in CTRs. Keywords that actually appear in the SERPs are most beneficial to surfers who read results summary and not SE spiders.

Most experts seem to be butting heads as to how beneficial meta tag description is for websites these days. The consensus seems to lean more in favor of raising rankings for CTR purposes or raising CTR for ranking purposes. However way you may want to look at, SE’s now use spiders and site “crawlability” to rank pages. Whatever little help you may give to boost your site may remain exactly that: too little a help.