Google Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide - Manual (Page 6)

Google's Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide, Version 1.1, 13 Nov 2008, latest version at Google Webmaster Central
A user performs the query [rarest baseball cards]
One of our deeper pages, with its unique description meta tag used as the snippet, appears as a
result
Good practices for description meta tags
•
Accurately summarise the page's content - Write a description that would both inform and
interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.
Avoid:
•
writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
•
using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about baseball
cards"
•
filling the description only with keywords
•
copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta
tag
•
Use unique descriptions for each page - Having a different description meta tag for each
page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple
pages on your domain (e.g. searches using the
site: operator ). If your site has thousands or
even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn't feasible. In this case,
you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page's content.
Avoid:
•
using a single description meta tag across all of your site's pages or a large group
of pages
Improve the structure of your URLs
Creating descriptive categories and file names for the documents on your website can not only help you
keep your site better organised, but it could also lead to better crawling of your documents by