Let's take a new look at Search Engine Optimization - (SEO)

I know what I am about to ask you to do may sound scary, but I am going to ask you all to "Think Like A Geek." You know?, those guys who set in a dark computer room at Microsoft and dream of becoming little mini me's, carbon copies of their god Bill Gates.

In order to accomplish this we must first learn a lesson from Star Trek's Mr. Spock. Please do not attempt this standing on your feet, we are going to do a "Mind Meld." Slowly move your hand to the image on the right, place your hand on the image, now, "Think Geek."

You are now a Geek, let's proceed with the lesson.

Every search engine optimizer has an opinion about the proper use of meta tags, some seo services will tell you that the meta tag for a sites description should only contain 156 characters, including spaces. Other seo companies will tell you that the meta description can contain as many as 161 characters, including spaces.

These same pros will also tell you that you will be penalized by the search engines if the meta description is too long, or even too short. So what is the real truth? To finally answer this question and put to rest your wondering and all the confusion, let's go straight to the Google Geeks and find the answer.

The image above (SEO 1) is from a Google search for "search engine optimization." Google's own web page has the #2 position for this search term in the organic results. But a closer look reveals something very interesting! Sure enough, the number of characters in Google's description is 156, including spaces. So it looks like the seo companies that say you should limit it to 156 are right. Wrong!

Take another look and you will discover that the Google description is much more than 156 characters, in fact, looking deeper we will discover that this description is 429 characters, including spaces.

Image (SEO 2) below, is a copy of the html code found on the page this Google search takes you to. You will notice first of all that Google is not even using a meta tag for their description. So where did the search engine pick up the description? It is already known by most seo companies that when the meta tag description is not present, the search engines will select a snippet from the text on the page and use this for the search engine description.

There are even cases when Google will replace your description with their own snippet, they do this when your description is poor, or does not fit the page content.

Image (SEO 3) shows the on page text that Googlebot picked up for the Google description. Now I will explain why you can use more than 156 characters and not be penalized.

You may be unaware of this, but did you know that Google often displays 4 and 5 lines of text in descriptions, instead of the usual 2 lines? The only reason we do not see this more often is because all these SEO companies have convinced optimizers to only write 156 character descriptions. I have personally seen 4 and 5 lines of text on several of my websites, they come and go, but they do happen.

The last time I checked Hubpages uses at least 210 characters in the description.

In conclusion, in the Google example we can easily see that it can not possibly be considered a penalty to include more than156 characters in the description, if it were, Google would not do it themselves.

Here is an SEO test I run often to test my content skills and SEO. I purposely do not include the meta description in many of my new projects. I attempt to optimize the pages to predict the text Google will make the description snippet out of. If Google picks up this predicted text and uses it as my description, I know that Google is going to list my site for the keywords I am after. If they do not pick up the desired text I rewrite the content until Google sees it the way I want them to. This has rarely failed me. You may also enjoy my hubpages article Make Real Money With Google AdSense.

When I see that the bots are using the description I like, then I go ahead and add it to my meta description.

SEO 4 image is an example of descriptions containing more than the recommended description characters.

Good luck with your Search Engine Optimization

I hope you have found this free SEO help useful, if so, please pass it on to others. It will only take a moment for you to help others in their search engine optimization. Just above the comments section you will see a button that says "share it" simply click on it and you can submit this seo information to your favorite social site or email the link to your friends and associates.

This article is written for informational purposes only. Author does not warrant that the information is in every respect accurate. Author is not responsible for errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in its article or the results obtained from use of the information provided herein. Article readers are always encouraged to check and confirm the information with other sources and through direct professional contact.