Doing Description on Web Pages
The description of a Web page, often referred to as the description Meta Tag, serves a similar purpose as the title tag. The description is not visible to browsers' users, but it is visible to other computers connecting to the Web page and that includes the search engines.
The search engines frequently use the description to display within search results information about Web pages and therefore the importance of the description is great. Web pages can do fine without the description. Major search engines have become very good at making excerpts from Web pages to display within search results, but there are search engines, social bookmarking services and link hubs that rely a lot on the description tag to get information about Web sites.
The description tag is the webmaster's opportunity to have a say about what information the outside world display about his/hers Web pages and why not use that opportunity.
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How are Web sites using the description? On average, there are 7.38 words in description of the Web sites we studied, and 3.17 words are in the content part and 1.72 words in the text of links. This is just an informative indicator, not very reliable since it can be tricky to match all the ways a simple tag like the description is set up, but it gives a glimpse on the use.
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