Meta Description: Tag Content and Page Relationships

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Meta Description: Tag Content and Page Relationships

The title of a Web page is important. A common truth that is almost undisputable. The Meta description tag is on the other hand of lesser importance, but how important is disputable. The Meta description tag is useless for Web site visitors, but it can be very useful for computers and search engine crawlers reading and indexing a Web site of which many use it to publish excerpt on link pages and in search engine results.

The Meta description tag is therefore important for marketing a Web site in a sense that it describes the Web site's content and many potentially see that description, but the question is if the Meta description tag is important in an overall content and search engine optimization of a Web site. One way to find out is to look at how Web sites use the Meta description tag and how its content matches against other Web page elements.

The first table shows data from three samples of Web sites. The first is a sample of general merchandise shopping sites that may or may not have prominent search engine positions, the second is a sample of shopping sites having prominent positions within search results of major search engines and the third is a large sample of Web sites having favorable positions within search engine results.

Meta Description Page Relationships: Percentage Found
Observed Element	General Merchandise	General Merchandise SE	Prominent SE Position
Title Words in Meta description	73.1	77.0	74.4
Meta Desc Words in H1	11.8	10.3	16.3
Meta Desc Words in H2	6.8	11.3	16.4
Meta Desc Words in H3	5.7	4.9	12.0
Meta Desc Words in H4	2.5	3.4	6.1
Meta Desc Words in H5	1.4	1.5	2.2
Meta Desc Words in H6	0.0	0.5	0.4
Meta Desc Words in Text	79.6	83.3	77.9
Meta Desc Words in Alt	15.4	20.6	16.5
Meta Desc Words in Link Text	65.6	67.7	65.6
Meta Desc Words in Title Tag Attribute	25.1	41.2	35.2
Meta Desc Length	82.8	85.8	79.9

Meta Description Page Relationships: Percentage Found

The Meta description tag is used by majority of Web sites, somewhere between 80% to 86%, which is similar to what we have observed before. The interesting thing is that Web sites having prominent positions within search engine results are likely to connect page elements with the text of the Meta description and less likely to use it excessively as is seen below.

Meta Description: Textual Measurement Average
Observed Element	General Merchandise	General Merchandise SE	Prominent SE Position
Meta Desc Length	375.8	213.0	177.2
Meta Desc Words	51.8	31.0	25.5
Meta Desc Meaningful Words	40.7	22.4	17.5
Meta Desc Complex Words	12.2	6.5	6.9
Meta Desc Unique Words	31.5	22.9	20.4
Meta Desc Meaningless Words	9.6	7.7	6.6
Meta Desc Sentences	1.9	1.9	1.8

The second data table and chart shows the Meta tag in numbers. Web sites having favorable search engine positions use shorter Meta descriptions.

A possible conclusion from looking at this data is that if you run a shopping site looking for better results from search engine and marketing efforts then you might want to pay close attention to the Meta description tag, its relationship with page contents, its length and the combination of words. There are online meta tag generators and text processing tools that can help you write the perfect Meta description.