What is the role of description Meta tag is SEO? Well some of you will say keywords and description meta tags are outdated nowadays.  Is it true? Certainly not. Google a search engine giant and probably the highest traffic source of your blog or site is giving very much importance to Description meta tag.

A well written description will clearly make idea about the page and more probability of user clicking on such results, increasing your clickthrough. There are various ways Google take the page snippets for the search results. Like generating the snippet from Open directory project or taking the references from the page content and the important one is from your page description meta tag.

Google is giving first preference to description meta tag for the snippet to show in search engine results.

Good Snippet example: 

Bad snippet example:

From above two examples you can get clear idea why snippet should be well written. First example is giving good idea about the page while second one is mess of data and likely will not get clicked.

Tips from Google for good Meta description:

1)  Write different description for different pages. Do not use same description over the site for all the pages. Also write different description tag for home page.

2) Use tagged facts in description: You can use the structured data like page author info, date of publication. If you are listing a product then use details of the product like price, offers, manufacturer, product age etc.

3) If you are generating description programmatically then try to optimize it with human readable content.

4) Do not overuse keywords in the description tag. Description should be descriptive!

Follow these description quality guidelines and you have higher chances of increasing your clicktrough.

If you have missed our previous post on basic SEO tips, click here to read it.