Some say that meta tags have no effect on your ranking with the search engines. Well that is nearly correct except for one ” the description meta tag. Almost all search engines (including Google) do not actually take it into account for ranking purposes ” yet ” many use it in their search results.
The content of the description tag is used more often than not by Google when it displays the results pages for a keyword. It uses only the first 156 characters though so make sure if you are using it to check the length of the text. If you do not check the length your text will be truncated and it will look funny.
So when you use a good description and a search engine uses it then it will help your click through rate. If your description is attractive people will click though more.
All meta tags should be at the start of the page inside the head tags.
Google is a little rogue when it comes to using or not using the meta description tag. When it does use it you can have full control of what is exposed to potential visitors but it will often switch what it uses at will with sometimes it just picking up a piece of text from your page.
To ensure you have more control over what Google picks out as the text in the search results as well as setting the description tag carefully also make sure that the first 156 characters of text on your page says what you would like to see in Google.
If you have a flash site or just use images with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and exhibit this when it did not select to use our description tag. This will tell you to ALWAYS have some text on your page even if it is only 156 carefully selected characters (including spaces).
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