January 13, 201115 yr Hello friends. I have a website that is all text, no multimedia stuff. I have given it a meta name description tag, because I want Google to give this custom subtitle in its search results. The tag is <meta name="description" content="Buy history magazines online" > The thing is, there's probably something wrong as it doesn't work. I.e., Google gives me as subtitle the first text that is found on my website, instead of that (i.e. it gives as subtitle the text of my menu: Products, News, etc). So I'm wondering whether I'm doing the meta tag the wrong way. Is it too short (is there a minimum number of words I should use)? What else could be wrong? Edited January 13, 201115 yr by timmo76
January 13, 201115 yr I have looked at my website, which is xhtml, and the meta tags are closed. Not sure what your doctype is, but it may help! (only learning myself, so don't want to teach someone to suck eggs ) My website was done by a professional designer, not me! Google lists the meta data ok!
January 13, 201115 yr If you only recently added the meta tag, then you need to give google a chance to catch up. Your site might not be crawled very regularly, so allow a few weeks for the changes to take effect. Also, it's a self-closing tag, so the correct xhtml syntax is: <meta name="description" content="Buy history magazines online" /> Edited January 13, 201115 yr by notbanksy
January 13, 201115 yr Author Thanks to both My doctype is HTML, not XHTML and my doctype is correct: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"> , so I guess I shouldn't close it. The other thing is that my site has really recently been put online (less than 2 weeks), so it maybe what Notbanksy says. I'll be patient a bit. Thanks.
January 14, 201115 yr A short description like that isn't really of much use to a search engine so it may ignore it and use various chunks of from your text copy. Meta descriptions should ideally be around 150 characters- ish and describe the page, also bear in mind that a search engine won't necessarily use the description, even if it exists, that's why your real copy is much more important..
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