There is only one meta tag that most search engines use – the description tag. It is not usually used for SEO ranking purposes, but it is commonly used (including by Google) as the text on the search results listing.
Google by and large uses the description meta tag as the text to display when it displays 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 select random text from your home page but commonly 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.
So when you use a good description and a search engine uses it then it will help your click through rate. If your description is attractive people will click though more.
The meta tags should appear in the head section of the page between the head tags.
Google is a little scallywag 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 displayed to possible visitors but it will often change what it uses at will with sometimes it just picking up a piece of text from your webpage.
To make sure you have more control over what Google chooses as the text in the search results as well as setting the description tag carefully also make sure that the first 156 characters of text on your page says what you would like to see in Google.
If you have a flash site or just use images with a little text, you have a problem! We have seen Google pick up the alt text from an image and exhibit this when it did not choose to use our description tag. This will tell you to ALWAYS have some text on your page even if it is only 156 carefully chosen characters (including spaces).
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