One of the first things many SEO companies will do when they look at your website is to make sure you have keyword optimised Description and Keyword tags. It’s common practise with a lot of SEO agencies.
However, it’s not necessarily the best thing to do. Firstly, the Keywords meta tag has no impact on Google rankings whatsoever, so is fairly useless for your SEO. Adding one will not improve your rankings in Google.
Secondly, the impact of the Description tag on your SEO is also non existent. It can have negative effects if you have every Description tag on your site the same, so if you do have them, you need them to be unique, as if they’re all the same they could pose you problems. There are instances though when removing the Description tag can prove beneficial.
For example, the Description tag will show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) when someone searches for a term that results in your website being found. If your Description tag is a description of your website which doesn’t contain the user’s search term, there will be no reason for them to click on your result.
If you do not have a Description tag, Google will print out the most relevant snippet from your site, which will most likely contain the user’s search term, and then Google will bold it. This will more likely result in the user clicking on your site.
It won’t help or hinder your rankings by removing the Description tag, but it will impact on the click through rate from the SERPs.
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