I can tell when I add a genuine Old 1990’s website to the Indieseek.xyz directory. See, when I’m adding a URL the directory script tries to fetch the Title tag and the Description meta tag. If it actually shows me a filled in Description, then odds are the website is Real Old.
So fair warning, I’m writing this for a selfish purpose because a well written Description meta tag saves me a lot of time trying to write a directory description of what your page is about.
This post is primarily for personal static websites like those being built at Neocities.
The big search engines pretty much quit using the Description meta long ago, so everybody lost interest and soon forgot about the practice. After all is was from the early days of Web 1.0, it didn’t fit in with the corporate advertising platform of Web 2.0. Well, we are building a retro web revival so screw the Big Tech search engine silos. I don’t care what they use or don’t use.
Who Should Use a Description Meta Tag?
- Personal static HTML sites, like Neocities sites, especially on pages that have little or no text on them, like a blank welcome/doorway/splash page. The big search engines might still ignore it but new small search engines devoted to HTML sites are being developed now and they might take description metas into account. And, of course, many directory scripts like mine look for Description metas when adding non-submitted URL’s.
- Personal blogs. You know better what broad subject themes you constantly blog about better than any directory editor will be able to figure out in a 3 minute review.
This becomes more important for the future because more directories are being built and more niche HTML site search engines are being developed that might use them.
Like I say, it’s a shameless self serving suggestion on my part, but I think it has some merit for the use cases above.
Does this make sense? What do you think?
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