Forget About All But The Description Meta Tag
Some say that meta tags have no effect on your ranking with the search engines. Well that is nearly true except for one ” the description meta tag. Most search engines (including Google) do not actually take it into account for ranking purposes ” yet ” many use it in their search results.
Google more often than not uses the description meta tag as the text to show when it displays your website in the search results. We find that it will use this nearly 70-80% of the time. The rest of the time it will select random text from your home page but usually it picks up the first 156 characters of text on the page if it does not use the description tag. Make sure your description tags are always 156 characters or less.
Microsoft Word has a great tool that will allow you to check the text length very quickly. This tool is visible on the status bar at the bottom of the page. To use it select the text you want to control the length and then double click on the word count statistics box.
All meta tags should be at the start of the page inside the head tags.
Google is a little scallywag 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 possible visitors but it will often switch what it uses at will with sometimes it just plucking a piece of text from your page.
To ensure you have more control over what Google chooses as the text in the search results as well as setting the description tag carefully also make sure that the first 156 characters of text on your page says what you would like to appear in Google.
If you have a flash site or just use images 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 did not 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).
