by David Anttony
There is only one meta tag that most search engines use - the description tag. It is not commonly used for SEO ranking purposes, but it is normally used (including by Google) as the text on the search results listing.
The content of the description tag is used more often than not by Google when it displays the results pages for a keyword. It uses only the first 156 characters though so make sure if you are using it to check the length of the text. If you do not check the length your text will be truncated and it will look funny.
Microsoft Word has a great tool that will allow you to check the text length very quickly. This tool is visible on the status bar at the bottom of the page. To use it select the text you want to control the length and then double click on the word count statistics box.
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 prospective visitors but it will often change what it uses at will with sometimes it just picking up a piece of text from your page.
To ensure you have more control over what Google chooses 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 images with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and display this when it did not 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 selected characters (including spaces).
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