Why meta tag descriptions are still important

[David]

It has long been known that most search engines no longer depend upon meta tag descriptions to index pages by relevance, preferring to use actual content keywords.

For a while, descriptions fell to the bottom of the pile when it came to SEO tweaks (I am as guilty of this as anyone). Recently, I began a review of my descriptions for CADTutor and realised that I hadn't been paying them enough attention, so I did a bit of digging around to see what the latest guidelines were. I found this really useful article (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve-snippets-with-meta-description.html) on the Google Webmaster blog that explains why meta tag descriptions are still very useful and should be carefully thought out on a page-by-page basis. Looks like I've got some (more) work to do!

[Tom]

That is a useful link thank you.

Also, I believe that Inktomi (MSN's search technology) continues to use meta keywords. Having always done badly with MSN, I have recently re-done all the meta tags - but have not seen any benefit yet.

[David]

And here is a perfect illustration of the "description" meta tag in action on the Google search results page.

The meta tag:


<meta name="description" content="CADTutor provides free tutorials, articles and a busy community forum for users of AutoCAD and associated software." />


The result:

16

We also worked out that the description should be limited to 25 words. Google will not display more than that so don't bother making it longer.