The meta description tag is a brief description of what each page is about. The meta description tags are part of what the searchers see when your listing is displayed in the results.
With description tags you are trying to attract human beings more so than the search engines. You should write a few relevant compelling sentences describing your products, services or web page content with the intention of getting your human visitors to click on the listing.
The description tag can be a close reflection of the opening paragraph of your page and should be unique to the page it is referring to. It should also contain keyword phrases found in the page title, page heading and first paragraph of page content.
You should optimize every description tag on your website. Even though it is not as important as other areas of optimization, such as title tag optimization, optimizing description tags gives you an opportunity to market your message and attract searchers to click through to your website.
The description of your web page appears in the SERPs directly under the title tag. You should definitely not use the same description tag across all of your pages because the search engines may think you have duplicate pages.
Also keep in mind that not all search engines use the meta description tag in the results pages. Furthermore, Google bases its description on the content contained within each page.
The meta description tag is located at the header of the HTML document for that page and appears as follows:
<HEAD>
<META NAME=“description” CONTENT=a brief description of your web page.”>
</HEAD>
Steps to optimizing your meta description tags:
1. Open a web page in your text editor or web development program
and find the <HEAD> tag.
2. Between <HEAD> and </HEAD> tag, type <META
NAME=“description” CONTENT= “Your optimized meta description tag and”>.
3. Save the file and upload it to your web server.
4. To see an example of a meta description tag in the results, navigate to Google.com and type www.seopalmbeach.com into the search box.
<meta name=”Description” content=”Palm Beach SEO and Pay-Per-Click Internet Marketing” />
