The meta description tag provides a brief summary (as text) of the textual content of the web page. It is represented in the form of small text documents (also called “snippets”) that appear in search results (Google, Yahoo, Bing Search) when the user makes a search. Its sole function is to present the content of your web page. It is supposed to tempt the visitor to visit the website. It may not improve positioning in all search engine results. The meta description tag is not necessarily displayed in the search results although it is present and optimized in the HTML page.
The description meta tag is placed in the section of an HTML document between the <head> and </ head> and is generally as follows:
<meta name=”description” content=”Description goes here” />
Here is search engine result of this article how it appears in Google search:
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You can see, some words are appearing as bold both in title (blue) and in the meta description. In fact, we did the search with full title of the article. As there are no other article with exactly same title, it is ranking there like the King.
But, what will happen, if multiple article or posts with exactly the same title is found? We did search with some keywords to make one result appear in Google’s first page:
You can see exactly the same titles. In fact, I am the writer of both articles. And yes, I must admit, I did one of those wrong things as every beginner does: copy pasting my own writing to other’s website (never do it). Now, think again, in this era of Google’s scrape hunt adventure, why it is living as second result despite the fact, in SevenForums it was posted earlier?
The meta description and keywords is the key. In real life, with some most used key phrases for the article, it actually comes above SevenForums. If similar condition happen with you and the first post in other’s website hampers your own website’s karma (= SERP): if possible, leave a backlink to your article there, saying “Find the original article along with more tricks by clicking here.” If the webmaster is too hard, does not allow to do so, simply go ahead and delete it.
The above situation emphasizes one more fact: WordPress does have far better SEO by default and it will give you better SERP than a PHBb forum.
There are other factors too, note both URLs. Our one is far more easy for any search engine to understand what is the article is about.
Here is link to the above article, if you are interested, you can read it.
