Optimizing Meta Description Tag

Like every other aspect of search engine marketing, relevancy is the key to obtaining better search engine ranking.

While your competitors may include dozens and dozens of search phrases in their description tag, fewer, more targeted phrases will increase the relevancy of the web page and will provide a greater benefit from your description tag.

Unless you have a small website that has only a few pages, resulting in the need to place many phrases in each description tag, you should aim for around 5-10 phrases in each description.

Keep each of the phrases within the same theme and you will further increase your chances of better search engine ranking for that page.

An optimized description tag might look something like this:

<meta name="description" content="Desktop computers and computer hardware supplies for home and office.">

As you can see there are many keyword combinations that can be extracted from the above description tag. The most important phrases are at the start of the description, which adds to your chances of better search engine rankings.

However, the search engines can also extract their own word combinations such as “office computer supplies”.

With Inktomi providing a paid inclusion service which re-spiders and indexes your website every 48 hours, you can change and manipulate your Meta tags to find a format that works best for your website.

Whenever formatting your description tag, remember that most search engines that continue to spider description tags also use that tag when displaying your listing. With that in mind, make sure that the description tag is inviting and coherent as well as optimized.