Writing seductive web page descriptions

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What an enticing description!

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You've now got titles on your web pages, fairly broad categorizations of what the page contains. Think of the title as a fish hook, now it's time to bait that hook with an enticing description. Why should someone click on your listing as opposed to the other top 10 ranking pages returned for a keyword search? By clicking on your listing what will the user be closer to achieving? Saving money, finding the specific product or information they are looking for, meeting someone new, making money, saving time, what? Tell them in your description!

All search engines prominently display the title in your <title> tag, when returning results to a search, and will also display an accompanying description, which in most cases you can control. A description should build on the information in the title. Most search engines will list at least 150 characters of text of your description, so this is the amount of real estate you have to play with. In most cases this text is taken from what is called the meta description tag. Building on the example presented in the previous page on page titles, the HTML code below illustrates how to insert a search engine friendly title in to your web page. The blue text represents the HTML code that informs the search engines that the upcoming text is a description, and the red text is the actual description.

<html>

<head>

<title> Condo rentals in the Swiss Alps from Interlaken property management</title>

<meta name="description" content="Book your dream condo in the Swiss Alps today! Click here to save 20 percent by booking on line!">

</head>

There are some search engines that do not recognize this meta description tag, and therefore will not list the description you have entered there. Lycos, Northern Light, and FAST (www.alltheweb.com) In order to get around this and keep control over the description displayed. You have to know what text is used.

Lycos and Northern Light will list about the first 200 characters of text on the page as the description and FAST will use about the first 250 characters. If you can easily make the first 200 characters of your page match the description in the meta tag above, by all means do it. If this will make the text on the page seem strange when someone visits the page, then skip it. The content, and design of your site for human eyes should be your first priority, and in some cases this will conflict with what search engines see or how they present it.

For a quick start, simply insert the meta description tags discussed above, and proceed to the next section on inserting keyword tags on your pages. If you would like more detailed information on each search engine, check out the pages detailing the specifics of each search engine, under "search engines and positioning"

I've heard a lot about the meta keywords tag, what is it, and how can I use it to my advantage?

http://www.webmarketingsuperstar.com/quickstart/meta-keywords-tag.htm

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