Meta Description: Words and Length

The Meta description tag has had its highs and lows. During the early days of the Web's search engines the Meta description tag played an important role for Web sites along with the keywords Meta tag. Nowadays, the keywords Meta tag is of lesser importance while the description tag has held its position of importance.

Theories on the size of the Meta description and its content are probably many. We find it useful to look at the Meta description tag as a classified advertisement for the Web page's content where the Title tag is the headline of the ad and the Meta description contains the text of the advertisement. This theory is as good as any, but theories aside, now we look at the usage for the Meta description tag.

The data tables below show the length and the number of words of Meta description obtained from two large samples.

Meta Description Tag: General Web Sites
Observed Element Observed Category % Found Average Min Max Median 80 Percentile Range
Meta Desc Length General 72.82 179.26 5.00 1,882.00 242.83 66.35 - 308.77
Meta Desc Words General 72.13 26.31 2.00 189.00 31.33 9.70 - 47.07
Meta Desc Meaningful Words General 72.82 17.82 1.00 165.00 23.67 6.82 - 31.30
Meta Description Tag: Web Sites in SE Positions
Observed Element Observed Category % Found Average Min Max Median 80 Percentile Range
Meta Desc Length Prominent SE Position 78.27 172.12 10.00 831.00 143.57 68.69 - 283.57
Meta Desc Words Prominent SE Position 78.15 24.71 2.00 124.00 22.14 9.63 - 40.39
Meta Desc Meaningful Words Prominent SE Position 78.27 16.84 1.00 75.00 13.57 6.54 - 28.07

The data shows that Web sites in prominent search engine positions are more likely to use the Meta description tag with the average length of 172 characters while general Web sites are slightly longer with a wider eighty-percentile range.

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By: Webmaster on : July 2009