SEO – The Description Tag

Just yesterday we went through the SEO starting point, the Meta Title Tag. Now that we have learnt the first important element in the ON Page SEO where we shared the precise topic of discussion in the web page through the title, lets move on to the next important element i.e. the “Meta Description Tag”.

The name of the Tag tells us about its attributed. Yes, the Meta Description tag, describes the content of the web page. It is the summery that gives the search engines and the web visitors a fair idea about the content of the web page. Google SEO starter guide describes the Meta Description Tag as, “A page's description meta tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. Whereas a page's title may be a few words or a phrase, a page's description meta tag might be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.”

The Meta Description Tag can be further explained as the snippet of the text displayed by the search engine below the title tag when the user’s query is displayed on the search engine results pages. I will again refer to the Google – SEO starter guide that tells us about the Description tag.

“Description meta tags are important because Google might use them as snippets for your pages. Note that we say "might" because Google may choose to use a relevant section of your page's visible text if it does a good job of matching up with a user's query. Alternatively, Google might use your site's description in the Open Directory Project if your site is listed there (learn how to prevent search engines from displaying ODP data). Adding description Meta tags to each of your pages is always a good practice in case Google cannot find a good selection of text to use in the snippet.”

The reason we base our discussion on Google guidelines is obvious. Google’s importance as the leader of the search engine industry cannot be underestimated; hence, all of us strive for visibility on the Google, hoping for success of our web presence.

SEO – Master the game or fade away

Not many of us have still mastered the game. We think or we perceive that we know it all, but the geniuses out there, the search engine makers, have always succeeded us beating the search engine optimizers at the game of SEO. Search engine are made for the web visitors, for them to find things, search and learn and interact with the businesses to buy the products, services or get the required information. This gives the online marketers as open field to create an effective presence through ethical means, not the way many of our friends did, used black hat techniques and exploited the opportunities available to us.

How in the world we have thought that we could use these engines to make big money overnight. The opportunity exists for everyone to showcase the products, take ethical steps to promote but by using unfair means, mastering the black hat techniques, the optimizers had shortened their web visibility through the search engines and found themselves out of scene, fading away from the glory of top search engine ranking.

• On-Site SEO – The basics of SEO where we can tweak the HTML tags, build keyword laden, but not keyword stuffed web content, Optimize images and graphics and make the web presentation of our company search engine friendly. This is the task that is rather easy to master and most of our friends play their SEO game around the on page SEO, shying away from the real ball game.
• Off Page SEO – Here we must understand that in SEO there are no short cuts. This is the place where the real juice is. To help our search engine friendly website to hold ground, we must plug in some of the back links. These come naturally, with all the off page optimization efforts whether we are blogging, article and submitting articles, issuing or publishing press releases, or when we are indulging in social media marketing or participating in forums, we are trying to build links the natural way.

We need to master the ethical SEO game that could lead our websites and web presence through to the top of the organic search engine results. The white hat way. Here the air is clean, no threats of being dumped by the search engine exists. We need patience and hard work. We need to wait for longer time that we would have waited through other means; hence, without taking sort cuts we can secure ourselves and our existence on the web.