Whilst the Poorhouse likes to conserve bandwidth costs by ensuring no-one ever locates this "treasure trove" of information, apparently some crazy webheads care whereabouts in the search engine results their website comes. As a gesture to those who do, there is an interesting tool from 1-hit.com, a search engine optimisation type company, that allows you to see your site as a search engine does.

This is useful to ensure all your l33t code isn't making things hard for the poor hardworking googlebot. The tool also checks your links are working and offers various random-but-targeted bits of advice. It also shows you what your entry might look like should someone stumble on your site on the big boys' search engine.

Despite the nu-skool low opinion of the use of tags on search engine results - they were abused so much search engines don't care about them much any more - it is often the case that the meta description tag is used as the lead-in text on search engine results, or as we now apparently call them SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages, catchy and it rhymes with "burps".) . This reason alone is enough to bother making it look nice; having the search engine return your site at position #1 is only part of the battle - you want to make it look enticing enough such that Mr and Mrs User can be bothered to move the mouse 2cm down and click the button.

How to use the META description tag