Meta description tags or “meta tag descriptions” are important since they contribute to search engine ranking. Without meta descriptions on your website pages, you won’t rank very high in the SERPS (search engine ranking pages). Even though the importance of meta tags have decreased over the years due to webmasters abusing their use, these descriptors are still relevant.
What exactly are meta description tags? Here’s an image of the meta tags for the Home page of NeoVetta.com.
A meta tag description is a brief descriptions for a specific page on your website which is placed within the “head” area of your individual web pages. This is either done by you or your web designer if you are unfamiliar with writing HTML. Content management systems such as WordPress or Joomla make it easy for most anyone to add in their own meta tags.
Each page, post, or article on your website should have a unique meta description tag. Since the above image is a description for the Home page of NeoVetta, we cover all of the services we offer in a nutshell. Just as a note, the top part that says “Sacramento Website Design | Web Development…” is called the “title tag”. We will discuss this at another time.
When you type in a specific string of words into a search within Google (or other search engine), relevant websites appear that contain the words you typed in. For instance, in the image above, you will see that the keyword string “Sacramento Website Design” is highlighted within the meta description tag. This is because I typed in “Sacramento Website Design” into a Google search and NeoVetta was one of the results that popped up. Meta description tags increases the likelihood that a person will click on your website since it contains specific relevant keywords.
Meta descriptions do not guarantee top placement in the search engine ranking pages (SERPS) but they do help. Since webmasters have abused the use of meta descriptions over the years to increase their rankings, search engine creators have had to de-emphasized the importance of these tags. They are still an important factor however since they help people decide whether or not to click through to your website. When writing your meta description tags, be sure to write short, concise, relevant, descriptions which entice the user to click through to your website.
