So you completed a set of title tags for each page in your site. That’s great! You can build on those title tags as you complete this next Search Engine Optimization.
Behind the Curtain SEO Step 2:
Create a description meta tag for each page.
The meta tag gives you a chance to expand on your title tag. Rather than a few words or phrase, it will be a sentence or two or a short paragraph.
Like the <title> tag, the description meta tag is placed within the <head> tag of your html document.
Hears an example from the Old Navy home page. The description meta tag is highlighted:
It says: “Oldnavy.com provides the latest fashions at great prices for the whole family. Shop Men’s, Women’s and Kids’ departments, Womens Plus, and clothing for baby and maternity wear. Also find big and tall sizes for adults and extended sizes for kids. Enjoy $7 Shipping on every order.”
You can see that this description incorporates a lot keywords and phrases. Besides emphasizing keywords for the search engines, the information you include is important because Google might use your description meta tags as snippets for your pages. (Google could also choose to use text from your page that is relevant to a query.)
Here’s what a Google search for “old navy” turned up as the first result:
(Note that the description matches the language in the description meta tag.)
- Make sure your descriptions accurately summarize the page content. Don’t stuff them with irrelevant keywords or phrases or make them overly long.
- Use a different description for each page. This helps the search engines and users get to the page that is most relevant to the query.
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