Clicksharp Marketing

The Meta Description tag is a one-two SEO punch: the jab is high search engine rankings, but the uppercut is that this is one of your best tools to maximize clickthrough to your website.

Last time around, we looked at the meta keyword tag, an over-the-hill relic of an SEO era long past. But people still sometimes refer to these keywords as “meta tags.”

About.com claims that the Latin root “meta” means “with, after, or beyond.” From an SEO (search engine optimization) point of view, it’s really the Meta Description tag which is deserving of it’s nomenclature.

The Meta Description Tag, more often than not, is what determines how the main part of your Google listing will look:

The Meta Description tag can often determine whether a viewer clicks through… or passes over.

The phrase beginning with “Internet marketing consultants…” is the Meta Description. So in actuality, this tag denotes information which follows or comes after the title of the web page… and thus is much more deserving of its name than its irrelevant cousin the Meta Keyword.

Imagine if your business’ listing in the search results misrepresented you, or showed information which could be taken out of context? Clearly, with the potential for millions of eyeballs to land on your listing, this is something you want to take control of. Google will happily show you how it’s done. For a more impartial take on the process, try High Rankings’ guide to meta descriptions.

Sometimes, the search engine may take a look at the keyword queried, and if it doesn’t show up in your Meta Description but it is shown somewhere on the page itself, it might get substitute in the two lines of text under the title. Don’t fret — they’re doing you a favor. (It’s well documented that matching queried keywords to identical keywords in the ad copy drive higher click-through.)

And just a little party favor for the road: try to limit your Meta Description to 155 characters. Beyond that, you’ve got no guarantee that Google will be paying attention.

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Paul Burani
Clicksharp Marketing
New York, NY

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This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 @ 2:15 pm on the category SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


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