The Meta Description Tag

The meta description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag.

Look back at the example of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one that says "name=description"? That's the meta description tag. The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed).

For this page you are reading, I would like it described in a search engine's listings like this:

    This tutorial explains how to use HTML meta tags, with links
    to meta tag generators and builders. From www.coolajax.net,
    a guide to search engine submission and registration.

Will this happen? Not with every search engine. For example, Google ignores the meta description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description for this page. Others may support it partially. For instance, let's see again how this page is listed in Teoma.

You can see that the first portion of the page's description comes from the meta description tag, then there's an ellipse (.), and the remaining portion is drawn from the body copy of the page itself.

In review, it is worthwhile to use the meta description tag for your pages, because it gives you some degree of control with various crawlers. An easy way to do this often is to take the first sentence or two of body copy from your web page and use that for the meta description content.

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