Some say that meta tags have no effect on your ranking with the search engines. Well that is almost true except for one " the description meta tag. Most search engines (including Google) do not actually take it into account for ranking purposes " yet " many use it in their search results.
Google mostly uses the description meta tag as the text to display when it exhibits your website in the search results. We find that it will use this almost 70-80% of the time. The rest of the time it will pick up random text from your home page but commonly it picks up the first 156 characters of text on the page if it does not use the description tag. Make sure your description tags are always 156 characters or less.
So when you use a good description and a search engine uses it then it will help your click through rate. If your description is attractive people will click though more.
The meta tags should appear in the head section of the page between the head tags.
Google is a little rogue when it comes to using or not using the meta description tag. When it does use it you can have full control of what is exposed to likely visitors but it will often vary what it uses at will with sometimes it just plucking a piece of text from your webpage.
If you want to determine what Google shows then the very first 156 characters of text on a page should be highly controlled because if it does not use the description tag it will use this text.
If you have a flash site or just use images with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and exhibit this when it did not select to use our description tag. This will tell you to ALWAYS have some text on your page even if it is only 156 carefully chosen characters (including spaces).
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