The meta “description” tag gives information about a web page. It is used as:

<meta name=”description” content=”This is the description of my web page” />

The first and the foremost reason is, that the content of meta “description” tag, usually called snippet, is the thing which most search engine extracts and shows up in search results. This is the place where chances of people visitng the page can be improved vastly. One has to be very creative and carefull to make sure that the descriptions are truly descriptive and not redundant. Redundant, in the sense, that the title of a page contains some lead text for the page, which usually comes as a link to the content in search results. The content of meta “description” tag should not be same as the text in the title. A potential visitor might be lost by not providing more and relevant information. This also means we are not using the meta information to its full potential.

Let us go through this example.

For example, if a title of the page describing the 7th Harry Potter Book, reads

<title>7th Harry Potter Book</title>
And your meta tag is defined as
<meta name=”description” content=”7th Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7): Books: J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPre by J. K. Rowling,Mary GrandPre” />
This meta tag contains the info which is redundant with title and this is also not proving any further information about the webpage.

The judicious use of meta “description” tag could be:
<meta name=”description” content=”Author: J. K. Rowling, Illustrator: Mary GrandPre, Category: Books, Price: $17.99, Length: 784 pages” />
This provides useful information in a very structured and consize way.

So the point is to use the title and meta “description” tag collectively and judiciously to improve chances of people visitng the page.

If meta “description” tag is not present in a webpage, then the seach engines usually take some lines from your body to dispaly as a snippet and one can not imagine what it can come out to be. Although, the search engines try their best to form an intelligent description, but human creativity has not been surpassed by search engines/machines yet.

Conclusion:
First do not forget add a meta “description” tag to webpages. The thing that follows, is to use the title and meta “description” tag collectively and judiciously to improve clickthroughs.

In the next post I will talk about the Abuses of meta “description” tag.