Search Siren

One of the first tag found on many web sites is what’s called the description meta tag. It’s a simple HTML command that tells users what the page is about. While most users won’t even be aware of it, since browsers don’t typically display that information, this is still a crucial part of every web site. Why? Because there are other beings browsing your pages, namely search engines.

All search engines have crawlers that browse the web and indexes pages. Since they aren’t able to interpret what each web page is about, they look at the meta information to get an idea of what they are indexing. The most popular meta tag according to SEO practices used to be the one called keywords, which as the name implies, is expected to include a list of keywords relevant to the site.

However, in recent years, this information has become less relevant, and search engines, mainly Google, don’t care as much about it. The description tag is instead the preferred way to talk about a page content. The text you put in this field should be filled with keywords, but not appear to be stuffed, or the page risks from being delisted. It should be kept a reasonable length, and reflect what the page talks about.

But this particular information goes further than just the indexes of search engines, at least in the case of Google. When you or anyone else does a search on Google, they get a list of resulting sites, with a 2 to 3 lines description under each result. The text showed there can be either the first couple of lines that the Google crawler found on your site, or if your page has a description tag, that’s what is shown to users.

Never make a web site without this information field in, and you will find your site has a much higher chance of getting good results from search engines.