The Google Webmaster Central Blog described what makes for a good meta description versus what makes for a bad meta description. Meta descriptions are a special tag that you place within the source code of your html page. They can be used by search engines for ranking purposes as well as for being displayed within the search result pages.

The tag looks like this when you view the source code:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”informative description here”>

The Google blog post describes key attributes of what Google considers making a good meta description, factors its says may increase the odds that your meta description tag will get used. They include:

• Unique meta descriptions on each page of your site
• Show facts about the content on the page that are not represented in the title
• Make the description easy to read
• Dynamic sites can dynamically generate descriptive meta descriptions easily
• Make sure your descriptions are quality and represent the content on the page

For more on meta descriptions and titles, check out our SEO archives on titles and descriptions.

Related Topics: Google: SEO | SEO: Titles & Descriptions

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz