Different search engines use meta data in different ways. While it’s well accepted that unique, keyword-rich and well written title tags are an absolute must for your search engine optimization efforts, some SEO experts have discounted the value of meta description and meta keyword tags in the past.

Vanessa Fox, product manager for the Google webmaster tools, has confirmed that unique meta description tags for each web page help Google determine the uniqueness of a web page. The meta description tags are used to create the text snippets that are displayed in Google search results underneath the page heading.

Google would normally create this snippet by looking at the content surrounding the query term on the web page. However, for more generic searches, where appropriate content is not found on the web page, Google will simply grab some text from the top of a page, which is often part of the site navigation, and highly unsuitable to be displayed as text snippets for a search result.

On November 5, 2006 Vanessa posted on onto Google Groups that, for “most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page . . . But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn’t found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page - in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page.”

If there are unique meta description tags available, Google will use these instead as a text snippet. So keep the following rules in mind for all your web pages:

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 8:29 am and is filed under Marketing, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.