The keywords and phrases you use in your Meta description tag don’t affect your page’s ranking in the search engines (for the most part), but this tag can still come in handy in your overall SEO campaigns.

What Is the Meta Description Tag?

The Meta description tag is a snippet of HTML code that doesn’t appear visibly on your web page, but which is nevertheless visible to the search engines.

It used to be thought that the purpose of the Meta description tag was twofold: to help the page rank well  for the words tit contained, and to provide a nice description in the search engine results pages. That’s changed, though, and today the words in the meta description tag aren’t given any weight in the ranking algorithms of Google, and only a small amount of weight in the other search engines.

SEO expert Jill Whalen explains everything you’d ever want to know about meta description tags in an article on her web site.