February 16, 2010

There Is Only One Meta Tag To Use

Some say that meta tags have no influence on your placing with the search engines. Well that is nearly true except for one \” the description meta tag. Most search engines (including Google) do not in reality take it into account for ranking purposes \” yet \” many use it in their search results.

The content of the description tag is used more often than not by Google when it shows the results pages for a keyword. It uses only the first 156 characters though so make sure if you are using it to check the length of the text. If you do not check the length your text will be truncated and it will look funny.

To check the length of a piece of text just paste it into a word document and then select the text and then double click the word count box at the bottom of the screen on the status bar.

All meta tags should be at the start of the page inside the head tags.

Google is a little rascal when it comes to using or not using the meta description tag. When it does use it you can have full control of what is displayed to potential visitors but it will often switch what it uses at will with sometimes it just plucking a piece of text from your webpage.

If you want to determine what Google exhibits then the very first 156 characters of text on a page should be highly controlled because if it does not use the description tag it will use this text.

If you have a flash site or just use pictures with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and exhibit this when it didn\’t select to use our description tag. This will tell you to ALWAYS have some text on your page even if it is only 156 carefully selected characters (including spaces).

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