Zafar's right. The meta description is used when the search engine spider can't find an appropriate description in DMOZ's index, and is also a good means to prevent the search engine's results pages from showing whatever it thinks is approprate in the search results for that page. It's a description of what the page is about, and other than providing that description (for human visitors) has absolutely NO SEO value whatsoever.
Meta description will mostly appear in results when keywords from a search query actually appear in it. Otherwise Google displays a snippet of your onpage content. (or your DMOZ listing if you have one and are not using the NOODP tag). It doesn't help you rank for keywords but will help SERP CTR. Meta Keywords are useless except to rank in Yahoo with mispellings. @jcunha - get rid of your doorway page (Fernanda Cunha Interior Design Consultants) it serves no purpose. If you have to use flash, try to describe what it's showing by writing at least a page (500-800) words of content on most/all of your pages - especially your homepage. Name your homepage the keywords you would like to rank for. Make sure your other page titles are descriptive (i.e not just contact, boutique etc). Sort out some of these problems and you might rank for very non competitive terms. Once thats done read up on link building and go from there. You don't seem to be in the search engines, as you have no backlinks so the link in this post should solve that problem.
They say a picture is like a thousand words (or something like that). But not in the case of search engines. The search engine must know what your site is about and it will not find it in pictures. You need text on your site. Flash intros are very fancy ( 90% of visitors skip it anyway) but it is rather useless when you need more eye on your site. You need text and more text. Describe in words what your service is about. Before you spend money on SEO services, first create a content rich web site.
Google is not the only Search Engine out there. Yahoo has explicitly mentioned having some percentage of SERP weighting given by checking meta tags.
I think you guys seriously needs to read these articles. http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2165061 http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2165061 Read them!
That 1 article is from 2002 , the following nowadays is correct: Read this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/revenge-of-the-metatag I doubt it makes much difference at all - the point is Yahoo reads them.
Thanks everyone for all the input I receicved... I am getting some initial results... however I would like to remove the "META TAG" entries that appear when I search for Fer........ Can anyone help me remove those entries from this forum so that they do not appear? Thanks again..... John sample: META TAGS - help! help! - Page 2 - 2 visits - 12:49pm@jcunha - get rid of your doorway page (F er nan da Cun ha Int erior Design Consultants) it serves no purpose. If you have to use flash, try to describe what ... forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=4209028 - 46k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this META TAGS - help! help! - 2 visits - 21 Aug<meta name="title" content="F er nan da Cun ha Int rior Design Consultants"> Your page have two titles so remove one and try to find some links with some more ... forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=4194843 - 92k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this
You want to stop search engines from bringing up this thread when people search for your company name? Sorry if thats the case it can't be done. Posts can only be edited for 8 hours and threads do not get deleted. You posted your website in a public forum and one consequence of that is that search engines will index the page. The only thing you can do is get your site above this thread in the search engines, which as it turns out, was kind of your goal from the start.