Placing the Description tag

The tag belongs inside the "HEAD" section of a Web page. It usually is placed after the TITLE tag and before the META Keywords tag, although it's actual position within the HEAD section is irrelevant.

The Description Tag

The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed).

You need to be concise and precise, with the most important elements of the description at the front i.e. "What META tags are etc" instead of "Influencing your website through the correct placement and use of the Description META tag". In the second example it is unlikely the most relevant part of your description will ever be displayed on any search engine results page.

A perfect example is shown below, the Description tag used in the Index page of Priday Design Studio.

The Description tag is combined with the TITLE tag to form the line display advert that appears in the "Natural" or "Organic" area on the search engines results page, as shown in this example from a Google listing:

In conclusion, not having a Description tag is likely to hurt your chances of getting a good position with the search engine results page. Having a bad Description tag will seriously damage your websites reputation amongst search engines and humans alike!