The meta description - A Smarter Way To Learn HTML & CSS (2015)

A Smarter Way To Learn HTML & CSS(2015)

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The meta description

If you’re hoping people will find your page through a search engine and then click on the link, you need a meta description. A good meta description doesn’t improve your search ranking, but it does increase clicks, because search engines display the description in the search result. When I googled “Carlypso,” Google displayed this result…

www.carlypso.com
Sell your car with Carlypso. Get up to 40% more than trade-in with the same convenience.

The two sentences following the link are the meta description coded into the Carlypso home page. Can you see why having Google display these sentences would increase the number of clicks?

You write the meta description in the head section of your page.

<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Sell Your Car Hassle-Free</title>
<meta name="description" content="Sell your car with Carlypso. Get up to 40% more than trade-in with the same convenience.">

Things to notice:

· It begins with <meta name="description"

· That’s followed by content=

· Then comes the description itself, in quotes.

· There’s no closing tag.

Some advice:

· Make your description as appealing as possible, but don’t promise more than you can deliver.

· Search engines cut off a description after about 160 characters. That’s a few more characters than a Twitter Tweet. Limit your description to that length.

· Don’t repeat your title as a description.

· Give each page on your site a unique meta description.

Add a meta description to your HTML file. Save the file. Display the page to make sure your change hasn’t broken anything. Sample HTML code is at:
http://asmarterwaytolearn.com/htmlcss/practice-89-1.html.

Find the interactive coding exercises for this chapter at:
http://www.ASmarterWayToLearn.com/htmlcss/89.html