SEO with ExpressionEngine: Description Meta Tag

Posted on 28 February 2010 | by Ryan Battles

What is the Description Meta Tag?

Meta tags are set within the head of the web document, which means that they will not appear to the viewer of your webpage.  They are there for various reasons, but usually for search engines or other technical reasons.  One of these tags is called the description meta tag, and it has some very specific purposes.

I am assuming that search engines used to read this meta tag’s content and use it to place that particular page in its search results.  Here is an example of such a tag:

While this can be a handy tool, many sites were using it to nefariously acheive search engine results that were not at all related to the content on the page.  Because of this, Google has claimed that it does not even consider this content for indexing.  Why worry about it then?  Because Yahoo! and Bing consider this content, and combined they account for almost 20% of Internet searches.  Also, the description meta tag contents are often used to display a preview of the page’s content on search engine results.

How do you leverage ExpressionEngine to make use of the description Meta Tag?

First of all, you must consider which pages on your site you want to make search engine superstars.  Many people wrongly assume that every page should rank awesomely for every search result, but this just isn’t realistic or effective.  The best way to reach search engine greatness is to focus each page on something very specific.  For example, this blog post is about using the description meta tag, so a good description would be similar to the one in the example above.  If I start talking about how my web studio creates modern designs with Photoshop, I’ve completely wasted someone’s time if they come to this page looking for information about that.  There are other pages on my site that I worry about focusing on our design skills (which happen to rock, by the way).

When I code a detail page for a website (i.e. not the homepage or overview page), I wrap the entire thing in a weblog entries tag, even the head of the HTML document.  Example:

This way, I have full access to weblog fields within my head section.  This can then be leveraged to create unique page titles, and descriptions for each page.  The easiest method of handling the descriptions is to create a custom field for that entry for the meta description.  I usually make it a text field with formatting set to “none” (we would hate for HTML tags to be automatically inputed).  You can then use code similar to the following to display this information:

So there you have it, a quick and easy way to utilize ExpressionEngine’s flexibility to improve SEO through the use of meta description tags.  I will leave you with a few pointers on how to write effective description tags:

• Create unique descriptions for each page
• Utilize keywords specific to that page’s content
• Keep the text between 25 and 150 characters in length
• Don’t simply copy the title tag text, this wastes the opportunity to add value with more keywords
• Don’t use special characters other than commas and periods.

On November 13, 2008, Google published a Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide. As an ExpressionEngine developer, I began thinking about how I could leverage ExpressionEngine to improve my search engine rankings according to this guide. As a result, I will be posting a series of posts as I push my way through this document, one tip at a time, and describe how ExpressionEngine can improve your SEO.