How to control description of pages

[webgeneral]

As some search engines ignore meta tags, is there another way to put in a description the search engines will pick up, other than in the first few lines of the body text such as img alt tags or comment tags?

[grnidone]

Welcome to the forums, WebGeneral.

I have actually had good luck with search engines using the meta description tag. So I usually put a keyword filled description on every page specific to the page.

Probably the best thing, though, is still the <title> tag. Keywords in the title in a complete sentence work well.

As always, though, the more text you have in your page that spiders can read, the better.

Remember also to put keywords/ keyword phrases in your links. I think I am the only person who still appreciates and uses text links at the bottom of every page...very old school html, but effective for spiders and people who don't want to wait for gif buttons to download.

Hope that helps.
-G

[rcjordan]

Google is still doing that horrible, semi-random, composite description, right? Not too much you can do about that one, except to be sure that you don't have a bunch of stuff you don't want to show near the top or in <noframes> if you're using that to optimize. I had some noframes text made into descriptions... I was lucky, it was at least (almost) readable, but it certainly wouldn't have been my choice for marketing the click.

[WebGuerrilla]

Repeating your description in an alt tag placed above your first lines of text is the only one I have found to work, and it only works at Fast. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for Google.

[webgeneral]

Thanks for the advice, I was thinking that maybe a style tag would do the trick, what do you think?