Head of Google’s Webspam team Matt Cutts announced last Friday the launch of a new algorithm that is intended to better detect and fight spam in Google’s search results. Google’s main objectives are those sites that copies content then republish them on another websites.

Cutts said the change was approved last Thursday and released earlier this week. Cutts announced its intention to combat spam in his blog post last Friday.

Matt also wrote on his blog:

This was a pretty targeted launch: slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.

Let’s say Dubaian is planning to put up a restaurant business and he wants it to be located inside a mall.

Then for him to get more people to eat at his restaurant, he needs to find out the top 10 most visited malls.

The simple reason why Dubaian needs to built his restaurant in the top 10 visited malls is simply because the more people going to that mall, the more chances many will try and eat at his restaurant. We all know that the above Dubai shopping malls like  Dubai Mall, Mall of the Emirates, Deira City Centre, Dubai Festival Centre are the busiest malls specially on weekends so these are a good location for Dubaian.

The same thing goes when you have a website. For you to be able to get more traffic, more leads and more sales, your website must appear on the 1st page or top 10 results of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. A website really needs to be on the first page of results to get any real chance of being seen for a variety of terms and one way of achieving that is by doing SEO.

Hope this example helps you understand why you need search engine optimization or SEO.

Although this tag does not weigh heavily in search engine ranking algorithms, it remains a powerful element of an effective SEO campaign. As the title tag, Meta description tag will always appear in search results. In general what you see in the search engine ranking pages are the Title tags then the description tag followed by its specified link page. It becomes a very important element to help attract visitors to click the link on your site.

Those who take the time to look through search results, read the titles and descriptions to find sites that are most likely to give them the information they seek are more likely that to be a targeted visitors.

The general rule is that you want every description of your tags to be unique. The description must be maximum 150 characters summary of what visitors can expect to find on this page and this page only. Descriptions for each page must be unique from each other. Be sure to summarize the page in a unique way.

But is not always advisable to put description tag on every page. There are some cases where it would be a better not put description tag. If you are targeting long tail keywords, then do not put meta tags. Description tags would be best use when targeting broader keywords.

An explanation to this is that if you go after long tail phrases in your article or blog post, there is a lot of variations that can come up in a description of 150 characters. If there are no description tags created, search engines will imports from the page snippets based on search made if those long-tail words are on the content.

I advise anyone  who’s into SEO to check this valuable resource.