Why do people create sites? Some need to promote their own company or company, while others need a visited blog. The reasons may be different, but one thing is certain for sure - the art of building and promoting a site takes time and effort.
And finally, you were able to build your first blog or website: decided what topics it will be dedicated to, decided on the design and started filling. Now the time has come to properly arrange the meta tags "description" and "keywords". What is it and how to use them?
What is the description meta tag
In short, description is a short description of the page that the user sees in the form of a snippet in the list of search results for Google, Yandex, etc. Snipet - displays description in the search results. Although it’s almost the same thing, in this article we can see the difference.
In the source code of the meta page, the description tag is located in the head of the html code. It looks something like this:
meta name = "description" Content = "Text of the advertising passage."
After the "content" command, a "=" sign is put and the value of this is the description meta tag itself in quotation marks. How to fill this field in your html code? It all depends on the content of the page and the theme of the site.
How to fill in the meta description tag
Despite the fact that some people decide to use the same advertising fragment for all pages of the site, according to the majority of experienced site builders, it is important to write your own text for each page. Why? This affects the user's visual perception. In addition, if the description is written effectively - it will attract more visitors to your site. One important point to consider is that the description should not be too long or too short - an average of at least 380 characters is desirable. And although, looking at the results of search results, you can see 200-300 characters, in fact, Google uses the entire passage that you wrote.
Thus, briefly and briefly you should describe what the user will find on your site. In addition, this must be done so that he wants to come specifically to you. Consider some examples of the design of an advertising excerpt.
Examples of description texts
Meta description tag - how to fill in? To find the answer to this question, consider some examples. If you are the owner of a psychology site, you could write something like: "Search for a psychologist, as well as tests, tips, family recommendations, and more." On the other hand, it is possible to briefly describe the purpose of the site, if it will be clear to most visitors which educational institution or enterprise in question. It may look like this: "Moscow State University named after MV Lomonosov."
If your site contains music or video content, then the description should list what can be downloaded from your page. It may say: "Download movies and music completely free in good quality" or "Free classics in modern processing - 128, 196, 320. Download for free."
When writing a description, you can take the most “juicy” part of the article (for those who are too lazy to write a separate unique text for an advertising passage). In any case, it is important that the user receives on your site the information that he expects to find and which you promise him. To learn how to correctly fill in the description meta tag, examples can be remembered or written out.
Automatic site generation systems
If you are building a site using the constructor, then the description meta tag for the site must be entered in the appropriate field in the editor. Along with the subheadings "h1", "title" and "keywords", there is a cell with the inscription "description". As in the case with other systems of automatic site construction, the meta tag description opencart must be entered in the field provided for this purpose.
Incorrect description
It’s better not to use ad-generating systems that automatically work with the page. Why? It is unlikely that you will be interested in the text compiled by the machine, because most often such systems use the first few sentences of the page, and this is ineffective. Not always the first paragraph reflects the essence of the material that you offer.
How meta keywords tag differs from description
Unlike description, keywords are a list of key words needed to characterize your page. However, keywords are also not the same as key queries of users of search engines - those words that are entered into the top Google or Yandex search bar. True, today Yandex almost does not use these words when issuing search queries. Google, as their representative said, does not pay attention to them at all. But the description advertising passage is much more important - users see it and use search engines. Therefore, special attention should be paid to key queries and the meta description tag. If you still want to specify keywords for the pages of your site, then in the html code of each of them you need to enter a meta tag:
meta name = "keywords" CONTENT = "enter keywords for our page".
As in the case with the description tag, it is located in the "head" of the page.
Key searches from the Yandex search engine
It’s good if your advertising passage contains a certain amount of words that users enter in the search bar. To determine the statistics of the entered Yandex queries, go to the site: http://wordstat.yandex.ru/. To use the service you must register. After that, enter your service or product in the line at the top of the page. Suppose your site is about history. We introduce the word "history". And in the results we see two columns: “key request” and “number of impressions per month”. For example, the words “history class” were searched for more than one and a half million times a month. Among the most frequently used phrases we can see: “online history”, “horror story”, “American history”, “ Russian history ”, “download history”, “history 6” and “history 5”. In addition, in Yandex Wordstat, you can select the region or area for which statistical information will be displayed. This is very convenient, because in different areas and cities people may be interested in different products.
If you use the most popular search queries in the description, then you can make your site appear on the first pages of search engines. To achieve this, you have to work hard - this is the main goal of every site builder.
Formation of snippets
As we already said, we are talking about the same description-text. Search Engines Bing, Yahoo! and Google display for the Internet user a snippet, which is indicated in the description meta tag. But Yandex does a little different. That is, what you write down in the tag of the advertising passage will not be shown in the snippet area in the search results of this or that page. How to fix it? The text of this passage can be customized in the office of the Yandex webmaster. However, there is information that we will not be able to influence, no matter how much we would like, for example, the number of hotel stars. To change some address data of a company or organization, you need to leave a special application. In most other cases, you can customize your advertising clip yourself. Here is a significant difference in the search results for Yandex. Why do you need to know this? Again, we repeat if we want to attract more visitors to our site.
What have we learned
So, as we saw, everyone can correctly fill in the meta description tag for the site. Examples of how to do this have been described in detail in this article. In addition, we could find out what is the difference in filling out an advertising excerpt for the search engines Yandex and Google. We learned why key user requests are needed and how to select them, as well as the almost complete uselessness of keywords. Using all the tips provided in this article, you can achieve complete success, and with additional dexterity your site may even take a place in the top ten that users of the World Wide Web will see. Remember one thing: having developed a site once, it is important to continue to improve it further so as not to lose the rating you have gained.