Meta Description Tag Defined
About SEO > Meta Description Tag
Meta Description The Meta Description tag is used to provide a brief outline of what the page is about. This is commonly used in the Google Snippet which is the small description found on a Search Engine result. Although the Meta Description is primarily used Google has the right to rewrite the description to provide a more relevant result for the search query.
They may take lines of text from your page’s copy and place them in the Snippet such as product information or lines in the body of the text that include the keywords in the query. Google states that the Meta Description tag is not used as a ranking factor although this is debated by SEOs. Other Search Engines are considered to utilize this description content in their ranking algorithms, such as Bing and Yahoo (which primarily relies on Bing for its results).
Optimizing your Meta Description Tag:
You should optimize your Meta Description tag to increase click-throughs to your website from the Search Engine by providing a brief and concise description of what they’ll find (which should match what the page is optimized for) and which can also include such things as price, quantity in-stock, shipping cost, brand name, discount or offer and even a call-to-action such as “buy now” or “save 15%”. Many websites that represent services provide their telephone number in their Meta Description so that a potential customer can call right there without having to click-through to the website. Google also allows for a structured data format to the Meta Description so that instead of providing a small paragraph about the content of the page; you provide a structured list of relevant data . Here is an example of a structured data description taken from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/09/improve-snippets-with-meta-description.html
Google states that it is best not to duplicate keywords in the Meta Description tag that are already found in the page’s Title tag.