A while ago (actually, quite a while ago,) Raj Krishnan of the Google “snippets” team posted a very interesting article on meta descriptions at the Google Webmaster Central blog. One of the key points was about “tagging” your meta description.
The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise. Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information — price, age, manufacturer — scattered throughout a page, making it unlikely that a snippet will capture all of this information. Raj Krishnan
Filed under Search Engines by Joe Dolson