Description Meta Tag - SEO or SEM?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Saturday, 13 of September , 2008 at 8:17 pm

I come across a lot of blogs offering SEO advice and probably the biggest area of confusion appears to surround the use of meta tags. You can think of your meta tags as being advice notes to the search engines and one of the most important tags is the description meta tag - not for SEO purposes however, it is for SEM or search engine marketing purposes.

SEO is the work you put into getting your site ranked highly in the search results pages. Once your site is appearing on page one, what are the searchers going to see. This is where the description meta tag becomes important.

A well written description meta tag can make all the difference to how much traffic you see coming into your site. The little snippet that appears with the search results is taken directly from your description meta tag. However, where a lot of individuals feel that, as part of their SEO, they need to keyword stuff this tag, using a poor or keyword stuffed meta tag could be counterproductive.

Google is one search engine that will examine this tag. It will only publish it if it feels it is a good description of the pages contents. If it isn’t, Google will extract information from the page itself and publish that. There are no SEO penalties, but it sure knocks your search engine marketing around.
Meta tags are no longer the central focus of SEO activity. To say they are irrelevant is not quite true. While they may not have a direct affect on your rankings, poorly written tags may have indirect effects on your rankings. For the description meta tag, this is your opportunity to market your site - to sell the contents - use it wisely and reap the rewards of your SEO strategies.

                      Category: Meta Tags