I was recently browsing a website that discusses search engine optimization and one of the ideas that was thrown about was that today, description meta tags don’t matter anymore.
This is an unfortunate bit of advice given to both web masters and developers, as well as business owners who are seeking search engine optimization help. While it is true that for the most part, Google puts little, if any significance on what is in the description meta tag for search engine rankings, it is still very important to make sure each and every page has a description.
Very often (but not always), Google will display this description in the text below the title of a page in the search results. This is your chance to tell people that are doing a search what your page is about. Make it interesting enough to entice searchers to click through!
One common mistake web developers make when creating a website is to use the same meta description text on every page. Google doesn’t like this, and neither do searchers. Each page on your website should have a unique description. That’s what the meta tag is for – to provide a bit of information to describe what the page is about.
It is true that years ago, search engines would include the words that were in the description tag in their rankings, but today as far as rankings it has not as much relevance. But regardless, make sure all of your pages make use of this meta tag.