How to Write Effective META Description Tag for Better Positioning in Yahoo and Msn
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Description tag is another useful meta tag which takes prominent place at your web site’s header. There are SEOs who think that there is no worth using this meta tag, but majority of them still agree that this meta tag helps in optimizing websites for Yahoo and Msn, in this article you’ll learn how to effectively utilize it.
What Is The Meta Description Tag?
It’s an HTML tag use to feed description to search engines, it gives description of webpage to search engines, it is declared after title tag of the webpage under head tag.
Example: <meta name=”description” content=“Your Home Page Description”>
Why Is The Description Tag Important?
Description tag is the very important tag, search engines take webpage description through this tag, though search engines don’t give any importance to this tag in their ranking algorithms but this tag can lead searchers to motivate and visit your website.
Tips To Write Effective Page Description Tag:
- Describe your complete webpage in one single line or in a small paragraph
- Forget about keywords, focus on “call to action” words with respect to page relevancy
- Avoid covering complete website in one paragraph, try to focus on page
- Use unique description tag for each page, since each page has unique content
- Keep your description tag’s limit under 160 to 250 characters, longer sentences won’t give any value but they can be hurdle in deep crawl of your web page
- Avoid using special characters such as ! @ # $ ^ & * ( }[ | ? /
- Avoid all capital letter, try to use sentence case
- Use motivational lines so that your listing will be clicked comparatively better than your competitors
- Don’t misguide search engine visitors, write what is available there at the page
KonstantinMiller
July 6th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I think I will try to recommend this post to my friends and family, cuz it’s really helpful.
Kris
February 17th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Can I ask specifically why “Avoid using special characters such as ! @ # $ ^ & * ( }[ | ? / ” ? Are there tests/data to show a) that it lowers click-through on organic results or b) that engines frown upon this and perhaps may penalize? Thanks!