Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description Tag is important for several reasons:
Meta Description Tag for Humans
The (concatenated) contents of the meta description tag are used by many search engines as
the description of your result in their results list (usually a short paragraph under the title). Therefore it is vital that your meta description
convey the content of your page in an attractive way to the user. There is absolutely no point
in raising yourself to the top of every search engine if users do not click on the results.
Meta Description Tag for Crawlers
Keywords and/or phrases contained within the meta description tag are counted towards the
keyword density of your page by most of the search engines. The following rules of thumb can be applied:
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Meta Description Tag Length
- keep it below 250 characters, since some search engines concatenate at this
mark. Concensus seems to be that circa 150 chars is best.
-
Keywords in the Meta Description Tag
- as elsewhere on your page, don't be tempted to load up your meta description with keyword
dense 'junk'. Many crawlers are sophisticated enough to detect and punish this behavior.
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