Description Tag

The Description tag is part of the site Metadata and one of the On-Page Factors for site ranking. It has little or no affect on the website's ranking in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS).

<META NAME="description" content="Optimizing On-Page Factors for Search Engine">

Search engines use the description when displaying a small snippet about the site in search results. Research has shown that searchers foraging for information are much more likely to click on results that seem to correspond to what they are looking for. Both the snippet and url are vital clues. If the description tag is omitted search engines will use some random text from within the page. You can think of it a bit like the text in a classified advert, short and snappy, it should be a call to action to explore your website. The description tag fits neatly into the inverted pyramid writing style used by journalists where the first paragraph is a concise summary of the page.

Different descriptions should be used for each page rather than boilerplate which can lead to duplicate content issues. The home page and any other entry or aggregate pages can use a site level description. Page level description should be use elsewhere. Prefer Tagged Factss to unstructured keyword lists and don’t duplicate information from the title. If the website is database driven it should be possible to generate the description test from information stored in the database.

The description text should not be more than 150 characters excluding spaces. If the website is included in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) search engines may take the description text from that source. The following page level meta tag will stop that

<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">

If you want to target just the googlebot the following directive will tell the google spider to not use the ODP description and not to follow any links in the page.

<meta name="googlebot" content="NOODP, nofollow">