Meta Descriptions

Hey Everyone,
I hope all are well.

Right to it,
I've been adding meta descriptions in the hope that Google and other
search engines would pick them up, but to no avail. I understand that
despite these tags, spiders supposed to crawl through and usually end
up taking a paragraph with relevant key words, BUT I find that the
spiders are taking my HTML titles.

Why does this happen?
How can I fix it?

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Google is not using the meta description and keywords in their ranking algorithm. You need more relevant content and links from sites with relevant content to get rankings.

Thanks for your help.

Opa, Nikolas. Your right about the keywords tag but only in some cases the description tag. If your description matches what Google sees on your website, you stand a very good chance to find your description in the site search results. Google only disregards the description if it feels it doesn't mirror your sites content. In this case the alternative ' pick out' of your site content is shown in the search results.

You can well influence this.That's a fact and you want to do so, since the description of your website in the search result is a vital part of the decision making of the users. Do i click here or not? Is this what I'm looking for or am i wasting my time?

This is also a measurement for your SEO work! If Google uses your Meta description and doesn't just pick out what comes along, you've done a good job on your page. 

If you want to know exactly what Google sees on your website use the new stomper site seer tool. (Check the SEO Forum here for more infos)
If Google picked another text than your meta description text to show on it's search results, your up for a surprise!!

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You are right. Google is using the description for listing your site in SERPs. This may affect the click through of your SERPs, but it wont affect rankings.

What has been said so far is entirely correct.  To be a little more precise, the 155 characters and spaces that Google automatically produces for the snippet in a Search Engine Report Page (SERP) depends also on the keyword phrase that was used in the search query.  This means that you cannot be sure that your Meta Description will be used for all SERPs in which your web page appears.  You therefore should think about the most likely keyword phrase that would bring useful visitors to your web page via search.  Your meta description should then include the words in this keyword phrase.

@bwelford - That's a very nice detail. Thanks

I do know that Meta Tag Keywords in not part of the google algorithm to take into consideration of ranking, like samiotis said, is true, they base on content more. However google do base on description also, but I find the description is more important for the search result display, easy for users to identify your site more relevant, if you using more relevant description. They are actually many more reason than you expecting. Social network do help in ranking.

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You are right. Google is using the description for listing your site in SERPs. This may affect the click through of your SERPs, but it wont affect rankings.

This is absolutely so. And here is why the Meta description is so important. 45% of searchers decide if they will visit your website based on what's in the snippet field of the search results. So if you includes your targeted keyword phrase in the description tag Google will use that. If your write the tag in a "Call to action format" all the better.

There was a good article I read that Yahoo does give importance to meta unlike Goolge. 

I'd post the link here once I find it again as it may be relevant to the topic.

Yes thats great, waiting for your URL


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The Creative << spam >> Company

Meta Description Tag

Syntax: <META name="Description" content="Web page description">

This is a Meta tag that provides a brief description of a Web page. It is important the description clearly describes the purpose of the page. The importance of the Description tag as an element of the ranking algorithm has decreased significantly over years, but there are still search engines that support this tag. They log descriptions of the indexed pages and often display them with the Title in their results.

The length of a displayed description varies per search engine. Therefore you should place the most important keywords at the beginning of the first sentence and this will guarantee that both searches and search engines will see the most important information about your that page. But only where possible.

Keep your description not shorter than 50 characters, and not longer than 149 characters including spaces. And longer is fully worthless as most search engines do not consider this tag deeply, if not at all anyway. If you really think must be longer, it will be fine, if it is not longer than 200 characters including spaces.

Be aware that if you are adding there irrelevant words can trigger some search engines spam filters. Take care that the tag is relevant to the page theme. They must be unique for each page. Avoid adding text not found in the visible text of the page.

To recap, description meta tags are not made for search engines. They are made for humans. So write a text that sales to convert, and achieve the best "Return On Your Search Engine Marketing Campaign Investment."

You are right. Google is using the description for listing your site in SERPs. This may affect the click through of your SERPs, but it wont affect rankings.

Yep... This is so true... Not used in SERP's, but definitely effects CTR.

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