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The Skinny on Meta Description Tags 

In conjunction with my post on the importance of title tags back in March I promised to elaborate on the remaining two fields – Description and Keywords – in the Page Settings and their relationship to SEO.

As I did for title tags, I would like to refer you to a post on SEOmoz.org in order to understand what role the meta description tag plays in your search engine optimization efforts. Rand Fishkin spells things out nicely and there is really nothing for me to add.

One point I do would like to reiterate though. A common misconception is that meta descriptions will help you rank or rank better. This may have been the case in the early days of the Web, but it’s certainly not the case in today’s search engine landscape, especially with Google. Some people do think that Yahoo! still ranks on meta descriptions, I don’t.

Think of it more along the lines of writing a pay-per-click ad (as Rand points out, that does not mean the same copy works for both though.) Your main goal is to entice people to “click through” to your website once you made it onto relevant search engine result pages.

As far as the Keywords field is concerned, I would not waste any time on it. DNN 4.5.x even does some “auto fill” now based on the Page Name field. Just leave that and move on.

What's your take on the meta description tag? Let me know in the comments.

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