Forum Moderators: phranque
Thanks
IMHO keywords and description meta tags are not important these days. Search engines either do not look at them at all or if they do, they give it very little to no value.
I'd rather have my page lighter by that many bytes and have my real content closer to the top of the file then use meta tags.
As far as the <description> goes, I just checked my serps on Google for a bunch of pages and quite a number of them were showing my page description. That seems to come and go, but it's probably better to have a BRIEF description available in for the SEs to use if they choose to.
Brief Description is the key here from my point of view.
If you are worried about how many characters you can squeeze in there, you'd probably be better off building more pages. That way it's easier to write a brief deescription that very accurately targets the page contents.
By brief I mean 5 - 15 words. If you need more than that, you probably need more pages, at least in my mind.
Title is CRITICAL!
Title - about 64 characters
desc - about 155 characters max for google.
keywords- just about depecrated due to spam.
description meta tags are not important these days. Search engines either do not look at them at all or if they do, they give it very little to no value.
If google is using the description tag in the SERP's then they are certainly looking at it.
I'd rather have my page lighter by that many bytes and have my real content closer to the top of the file then use meta tags.
real content in the <head> is as close at it gets to the top of file. (besides inurl)
title and description.
You can confirm the 50/150 through reading the SERPS. The only reason I use these tags is to attract a visitor from the SERPS. I keep the keywords to 1000, well, just because.
A description that says something like:
Your number 1 source for widgets online. Widgets galore in all types of colors and sizes
looks much better than:
¦home¦contact¦about¦... for a type of widget you should... go somewhere else...
If you don't specify a description tag, go over the character limit, or have an error in your code, the SEs will go pick their own description... and then it's no longer up to you what they display.
Google doesn't actually use the meta description to determine rankings
You never know..
when I do a search and find my META description with search terms highlighted ... you just never know.
