Sometimes I think that we get so caught up in the big picture of building, delivering, and maintaining a project, that it becomes easy to forget the details.
If you’re maintaining a web site or application and search engine optimization matters, there are a number of a little things that you can do to help manipulate how your project appears to Google and on the search engine results page.
Here’s a quick tip on meta descriptions, how to set it up on your site, and why it matters.
Meta Descriptions are tags placed in an HTML document that are meant to explain the data represented on the page. Although they aren’t required, they should be clear and roughly 70 characters in length.
If you don’t have one, the search engines will use some of the content form the body of your site. For example:
But if you do opt to include one, then the search engines will use it instead:
To add a meta description to your page, grab any page from your site. If you’re using a platform like WordPress, grab the header.php page as this is included at the top of every page; otherwise, you’ll need to modify each page in the project.
Add the following line in the head section of the page. Of course, be sure to change the actual value for what’s in the content area.
[cc lang=”html”]
[/cc]
The next time the search engines crawl your site, your content will be re-indexed updated in the search engines results page.
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