What is a Meta Tag Description?
Wednesday, July 8, 2009 at 03:08PM 
Following search engine optimization training requires understanding a lot of technical terms and techniques for getting search engines to find you, and list your web pages properly on the Internet. Understanding what a Meta Tag description is and implementing it can make a big difference in your web traffic.
What is a Meta Tag Description?
Let’s start with what a Meta Tag description does. It helps direct the search engines to list and index your web pages properly. Then you can be easily found for the keywords you’ve chosen and ultimately, “get the click”.
The Meta tags description is not seen by your visitors and is placed in html code on your web pages. If you are in charge of placing your own code, the description goes between the <head> and </head> portion of your web page. You can see an example of the Meta Tag in the picture here.
The Meta Tag is seen following “<Meta name = description”. You will type in your description following “content =”.
*Note: You can actually view the same information on most any web page by going to the top of your browser; clicking “View”, then clicking “Page Source” to see the html code for that site.
For Proper SEO, What Makes a Good Meta Tag Description?
One SEO secret is that the ideal Meta tag is about 150 characters, or about 25 words. You can actually include a longer description, but our goal is to be as concise and accurate as possible with our description so that Google uses what we included instead of picking up sentences off our web page. This is where our Meta Tags description is actually seen if Google chooses to include it: in the search engine listing for our web page.
In the example here, you’ll see why it’s so important to actually have a strong, compelling, and precise Meta Tag description. It is possible that search engines will use the description we’ve entered for our Meta Tag and display it in the search engine listing under the Title Tag.
If our Meta Tags description is not used, or is not there to begin with, the search engines will pull sentences from the web page to be used in the listing, and most likely, that is not an accurate description of our web page.
When we make it easy for Google to use our Meta Tag, we want our description to include our keywords; be under 150 characters, and include a call to action, if possible. Whether our listing gets the click or not, depends on our use of these little SEO secrets. For more information on Title Tags, see my section on search engine optimization training. With a strong Title Tag and Meta Tag description, our human visitors will see what we want them to see and click on our listing because the search engines have listed and indexed our web pages correctly.