More often than not, the decision to use a meta description tag and what to say with it is made between the website designer & the client well before an SEO becomes involved with a website. There are significant marketing implications to the choice of wording and your designer isn’t often the person to best advise you here.

What website owners fail to realize is that their meta description tag will often appear no matter the search query. If the query doesn’t map to the tag, the website will be at a significant disadvantage at being chosen by the searcher. Frequently, the problem is compounded by using the same tag on every single page regardless of content. Also, description tags, like all meta tags, are worthless for improving search engine rankings.

Compared to text snippets supplied by the search engines (which I believe are usually excellent representations of the page content), the novice webmaster is better off skipping the meta description tag entirely.

If You Feel You Need To Use Meta Description Tags, Here Are A Few Rules:

1) Do not use the same tag on every page.
2) Keep the tag short…the search engines will truncate it.
3) Describe the page content…don’t give your USP or generic business description.
4) Try to project the top 1-3 search engine keywords on the page and make sure to include them in the tag.
5) Realize that if the search query doesn’t map closely to the tag, your website is far less likely to be chosen by a searcher.

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