Meta Optimizing

There is an interesting thread at OutFront that discusses the meta description tag and what limit there is on length. When it comes to optimizing your site for search engines, how important are meta tags? In the view of many experts, search engines (especially Google) have learned to minimize the importance of meta tags as being little more than internal spam.

An exception would be the description meta tag which is your best opportunity to sum up what your site is about in a few, carefully picked, descriptive words. The description will be picked up by search engines, so what you say is important. Not only that, but how fast you say it can be important. Too long a description may look like “stuffing” and will be truncated anyway.

“Most search engines will truncate the description tag displaying no more than 200 characters so there is likely no reason to go higher. Also, meta data used to be a place where many people would stuff keywords (now, it’s content stuffing). You *may* look like your keyword stuffing if you have too much information in the meta description.

To avoid truncation by the search engines in their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), your meta description tag should be concise, within 140 to 200 characters. Truncation will vary depending on the search engine and the number of characters displayed in the search results.”