One Stop Meta Tag Mania
There is only one meta tag that most search engines use – the description tag. It is not ordinarily used for SEO ranking purposes, but it is ordinarily used (including by Google) as the text on the search results listing.
Google by and large uses the description meta tag as the text to present when it displays your website in the search results. We find that it will use this about 70-80% of the time. The rest of the time it will select random text from your home page but commonly it picks up the first 156 characters of text on the page if it does not use the description tag. Make sure your description tags are always 156 characters or less.
So when you use a good description and a search engine uses it then it will help your click through rate. If your description is attractive people will click though more.
All meta tags should be at the start of the page inside the head tags.
Google is a little scallywag when it comes to using or not using the meta description tag. When it does use it you can have full control of what is exposed to potential visitors but it will often vary what it uses at will with sometimes it just plucking a piece of text from your page.
To make sure you have more control over what Google selects as the text in the search results as well as setting the description tag carefully also make sure that the first 156 characters of text on your page says what you would like to see in Google.
If you have a flash site or just use pictures with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and exhibit this when it didn’t choose to use our description tag. This will tell you to ALWAYS have some text on your page even if it is only 156 carefully chosen characters (including spaces).
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SEO Meta data shown on Google listing