Last post we talked about page titles. This post we will be touching on page descriptions.

Page Descriptions

Page descriptions are also important to SEO, but not necessarily as much as page titles. They do bear mentioning though. Your description gives readers a general idea of what your page will be about, and should be related to your page title.

The description meta tag looks something like this: <meta name=”description” content=”Wow, this is my cool description of my web page!” /> and appears in Google search results like below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The description’s responsibility is to give the reader a quick synopsis of the page. Google has announced that they don’t use the description meta tag for ranking but I think it’s still worth adding to your page. If nothing else, for readability of your search results. Also, just because Google doesn’t use the description tag, does not mean that other search engines do not. (Bing,Yahoo)

Description Length

Description length should be kept to about 160 characters max. Anything past this will be truncated, similar to page titles.

Description Uniqueness

Descriptions should be unique to each page, and should be relevant to the content of the page.

Overall, descriptions are not vitally important to your Google search rankings, but they are still worth putting a small bit of effort into. For search result readability and other search engines.

Stay tuned for my next SEO tip which will be heading tags.