Many say that meta tags have no effect on your placing with the search engines. Well that is nearly true except for one ” the description meta tag. Almost all search engines (including Google) do not in reality 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 display when it exhibits your website in the search results. We find that it will use this around 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.

The meta tags should appear in the head section of the page between 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 exposed 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.

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 display 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 chosen characters (including spaces).

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