If you are like me, you woke up thinking about meta tags role in SEO. Probably not, but I had a meeting with a guy last night and he had 1999 understanding of the web, and he proceeded to question my statement, “Meta Tags don’t matter anymore.”

If you keep up with SEO, you probably will tend to agree with that statement, but meta descriptions, on the other hand, still have a role in search results. I like to think of the meta description as the elevator speech of the page. Why is the page here? What is the page about in a very short succinct sentence? How is it going to benefit the reader?

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Insert Elevator Speech here.”>

Meta descriptions, you probably know, are generally used for the page description first when displaying search results.  If you don’t have a meta description, the search engine will likely take some text that is cached from the page. Be creative, but be accurate because the browser is making split second decsions.  Just like your elevator pitch of a new idea, set the hook and beg the click.

I was playing around with ping.fm tonight because I spend, oh about, twenty minutes a day updating different statuses * exageration *.  Then I happened on this SUPER url shortener roundup over at SEO Moz. The pros and cons is very comprehensive.

Obviously, ping.fm doesn’t fit squarely within the “url shortener” hole, but I really like that I can microblog the full URL and the service will shorten, microblog, status update, and bookmark with a single stroke of submit.

A friend told me today that he thinks God says, from time to time, in the best Jeff Foxworthy voice, “Watch this…”  Then someone’s life is totally uprooted and changed around.

That is what is happening right now.  This summer I found out that we are expecting number three, and this week I found out that I am probably starting my own internet / seo / marketing / real estate business. . . Watch this.

FYI – I am looking for a good company name. If you know one, comment it.