Web Design, SEO & CSS… etc

I was just reading about search engines ignoring description meta tags these days. Not exactly news but the article went on to say that there is no need to include them at all… I have to disagree!


Ok so the description meta tag itself no longer adds any indexing weight to the website but what about how that site displays in search engine results pages?

You’ve seen the search results, something like this:

Nice Keyword Title (from the <title> tag)
Here’s the keyword text that is taken from the description keyword rich meta tag with more keyword text here from the description keyword rich meta tag.
http://www.mykeywordwebsite.com

You can see how keywords used in the search are highlighted bold in the search results if they’re there in the site title, description and url. All those extra bold keywords within the result naturally draw a persons eye to it. It might not be the top result on page one of Google but it might stand out more than the top result!

My point is the description meta tag is used by the search engine to display the text below the search result link… This means you can control what the search engine result shows the person searching.

If the description meta tag is left blank or removed totally the search engine spider will just grab some random text snippet from the page and display that. You might be lucky and it’ll grab something useful but it might be some crud from your site footer.

In my opinion the description meta tag should still be used to describe the page and include the keywords you want to show up in search results.