SEO 101 - Part 3: Everything You Need to Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags

• SEO 101 - Part 2: Everything You Need to Know About Title Tags
• SEO 101 - Part 4: Everything You Need to Know About Headings and Alt Attributes
• SEO 101 - Part 13: Everything You Need to Know About Links
• When, Why and How to Construct a Meta Description Tag

Great tutorial! Many times I take meta tags for granted anymore and figure wordpress and other applications will automatically do this. However for my static pages I tend to forget about it so thank you for the refresher.

An interesting series of SEO articles. Part 4 Everything you need to know about content next?

For the Description I say the length should be, 150 characters including spaces - but is that getting too picky?

You're right about the keywords, I'd just say commas and no spaces and use The most important words no more. Move on :)

Good article. I totally agree that a lot of people believe, wrongly, that ranking high takes care of click throughs. The description tag is a great way to control what you display on the serps, and whats great about it is that you can use more of a call to action type piece of text.
@Ian I always make sure my description tags are 150 characters as that tends to be the limit on the SERPs
Regarding the kweyword tag, I tend to use this mainly as a form of taxonomy. It provides me with a quick method of checking what each theme a page is about when I scan the site on a spreadsheet. I never bother with capitalisation, where spaces should go and commas. As a general rule of thumb I don't spend more the 5 mins on the keyword tag.

Eddy

Nice explanation. Thanks Stoney.

There's one more point about the 20-40 long meta description: apart from describing what the page content is specifically about, it would urge more click-through if you incorporate a "Call to Action" in it.

Then, more people will be likely to click on your title.

Rahman, what kind of call to action do you generally use in a meta description? I'm not sure I've seen that done.

Hi!

Interesting post but I don't agree with your view of keywords. Not totally at least. Keywords can be a way of administrate the internal search engine. The search engine product I use professionally can be fine tuned through keywords (and lots of other ways.)

Jes

Jesper, you are absolutely right, but that falls outside the scope of what I'm talking about. I approached this solely from an external search engine angle and those who worry about it for naught. But for internal search, yes, a lot of care should be taken with the tag if it is being used for it. Though any tag (even a made-up one) could be used to pull internal search keywords.

I thought that it had been generally agreed (and confirmed by Matt Cutts at Google?), that the META keyword tags are ignored by Google in page ranking.

So i think its more important to think about how the meta keywords tag can negatively effect your site, rather than if spaces or commas should be used, in that it gives your competitors (or anyone competitively analyzing your site) a good indication of what keywords your optimizing for. Granted its obvious anyway by seeing how you have optimized your url, title, content etc but i think anything, no matter how minor, you can keep to yourself has to be an advantage

Stoney, I've explained it in my recent post as it's one of the goals one can achieve using a powerful meta description. In a nutshell, it gives more reason to the searchers to click on the linked title and visit the resulted page. Find out more here:

http://www.site-booster.com/blog/2010/01/5-steps-toward-powerful-meta-description/

Great wrap up on why the description tag should not be neglected. My clients simply don't understand why all these tags may not be long and involved, but they still add some weight and importance in the overall search process.

Hi, I've just come across your Blog through Technorati. I am in the process myself of trying to optimise my website, as well as my blog, and I just wanted to say that this was extremely helpful. I, no doubt like many others, presumed that the Meta Description was another space to put Keywords, but i'm just off to change them now !!

In a moment of sales dropoff-induced weakness, I signed on with a popular SEO company about a year ago for help, getting a package of backlinks and 5 page SEO. A huge red flag went up when they asked me to change the page title to just keywords, the description tag to something that wasn't what I was optimizing for, and gave me a keywords meta tag a mile long. I'd been reading you long enough to know that all of those were sleazy, and not what I wanted for a consumer experience, anyway. But, they were the "pros," right?

They kept promising me they'd "hit it out of the park," but nothing. I was embarrassed when my results showed up on the pages--even I wouldn't have clicked on my own link after reading that. Thankfully, I came to my senses and undid everything they told me to do. At least when I showed up on page 2 or at the bottom of page 1, I could respect myself.

That is really a nice explaination.
What happens if meta descriptions are repeated in some of the web pages?

Thanks in advance
Ashish

Duplicating descriptions isn't recommended but a little bit won't hurt.

Great post! Really the only tags I use are the title and description. I'm pretty sure google, yahoo, bing just ignored the keyword tag. But on the other hand, I think that some of the small search engines still might put a little stock in the keyword tag.

Once again, great post!

Good information and thanks for reminding me of the importance of getting this right. I will review very soon (not enough hours in my days and evenings!) I remember it been said at a B2B training session, that each page should be treated as an individual website. This is so true and sits in line with what you are saying here.

Thanks

Doesn't the position of the keyword in your page title or description affect relevance too?

@copywriter - yes that can make a slight difference. I suggest putting keywords near the front if possible.

Hi, Now I am in the process myself of trying to optimise my website, as well as my blog,
but I heard that meta tags are less important now a days in search engines.this concept is really helpfull for me.

Stoney,

It is a compelling article. I am surprised to recall that most SEO trainings and conferences I attended over the years did not emphasize on the Description tag much. However it is now very obvious to me the Description tag can be so powerful in promoting the site and getting a real clickthrough.

In most trainings (and conferences) people preached that Description tag is important for getting a higher ranking. Therefore most people repeat key-phrases in the Description tag too. Now my question is, Is Description tag completely irrelevant (or slightly relevant) for ranking? Please advise. Thanks again.

I believe the description meta tag is slightly relevant for rankings, but mostly relevant for clickthroughs.