Some say writing the meta tags for each Web page have become less important in SEO, but if there’s a meta tag that remains useful until today (maybe not as useful as it was in the 90’s), it’s the meta description. Contrary to popular belief that the meta description is no longer effective, experts say that it is still very important to SEO because the meta description (and meta keywords) still matter in Yahoo! and MSN. It won’t be a smart move if you neglect the techniques that work for those two search engines. After all, they are among the three giant search engines today.
A meta description should be included in a page not because it will help a website rank higher in search engines, but because it will help a website distinguish itself from other websites in the SERPs. Most Search users almost always check out the description of a certain website found on the SERP before pointing the mouse to the website’s link. So it’s important that you provide a convincing and descriptive meta description.
However, there are times that after you’ve written a unique, search-engine friendly meta description for each of the pages, you still won’t see those descriptions in the SERPs, rather you will see a different kind of description. This is probably because you’ve recently submitted your website to the ODP (dmoz) or Yahoo! Directory, which are two of the largest and influential directories. If your website is included in either of these two directories, chances are, they are the ones that provide the title and description of your website to search engines.
In order for search engines to stop reading the title and description from dmoz or Yahoo! Directory, you can add the following meta tags inside the <head> section of your page:
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP" /> or <meta name="Slurp" content="NOODP" />
and
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOYDIR" /> or <meta name="Slurp" content="NOYDIR" />
These tags will allow you to have full control over your pages’ titles and descriptions. For more info about this topic, check out the following articles:
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