There is only one meta tag that most search engines use – the description tag. It is not normally used for SEO ranking purposes, but it is normally used (including by Google) as the text on the search results listing.

Google mostly uses the description meta tag as the text to present when it shows your website in the search results. We find that it will use this around 70-80% of the time. The rest of the time it will pick up random text from your home page but usually 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.

Microsoft Word has a great tool that will allow you to check the text length very quickly. This tool is visible on the status bar at the bottom of the page. To use it select the text you want to determine the length and then double click on the word count statistics box.

All meta tags should be at the start of the page inside 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 picking up a piece of text from your page.

If you want to determine what Google displays 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 pictures with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and display 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 selected characters (including spaces).

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