Google Recommends Using Meta Description Tag

Here's one for the people interested in SEO. Google Recommends Using Meta Description Tag. I thought this was pretty obvious, and it's certainly been the advice that I've been handing out over the last year or so. Basically, put a meta tag descriptor onto every page to define exactly what that page is about, otherwise Google will do it for you by taking the first few words it finds either at the start of the page, or keyword in context, which may well be not what you want to happen. Besides, it's a good academic practice anyway - if you can't sum up your webpage in a short pithy description then you've got too much diverse content on it so you need to think again.

(If none of that made any sense to you, don't worry about it - you probably didn't need to know in the first place!)

Comments

[Michael Dunne]

That's interesting news. I stopped using the description tag on my sites years ago when I discovered that they never showed up on Google anyway, and I remember reading somewhere that Google didn't use the tags. I'll have to re-think my policy now.