About META Description Tags

[HybridSoldier]

Hello everyone,

I had a question about this article. Right now i'm making a site of my own (hosted on Tripod) and i'm trying to get my site up so it shows up on search engines (mainly Google).

I'm having difficulty's using the "Meta Description Tag" on my site.

In the article (How to use HTML META tags) it says "Look back at the example of a meta tag. See the first meta tag shown, the one that says "name=description"? That's the meta description tag. The text you want to be shown as your description goes between the quotation marks after the "content=" portion of the tag (generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed)."

I captured a screenshot of what it looks like:

http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/5...titled3gq2.png

I was able to follow all of that, but the problem is, my site says

"200 character limit. HTML tags are not allowed. Some search engines use the description in the search engine results."

Here's a screenshot of what comes up after i typed the META tags in:

http://img382.imageshack.us/img382/948/untitled4if6.png

So, my question is, how am i supposed to use the META tags without being able to use the HTML tags?

I did exacltly what is says in the article but when i go to click "Ok" (on my website) is says

"The description meta tag is not defined correctly. Seperate keywords by a comma. Ex: web design, animation, design, create. HTML tags are not allowed."

Then i tried putting comma's in, but it still didn't work!

Am i doing something wrong? It'd be greatly appreciated if someone could help me out!

[jimbeetle]

I'm not really familiar with the Tripod site builder, but I'm going to make the assumption that it works like many others. It's probably set up so you don't have to type any HTML tags or other code and applies the proper tags and formatting automatically.

I'd suggest going back in and trying to enter the information without any tags, just straight plain text, and see what happens.

[HybridSoldier]

Oh, so just, write it in without the "<" and ">"?

EDIT:

Hmm, okay, the message doesn't come up anymore.

But now for some reason when i'm trying to Verify that i'm the owner of the site (on Google), it can't read my META tags.

Here's a picture of what i'm talking about:

http://img157.imageshack.us/img157/5...titled5xm9.png

Why does this have to be frustrating?

Another question.

Is there any other way to get my site up on Google? I've tried adding my site but they haven't seem to come across it or something.

[g1smd]

What happens if you just type in the words you want to appear in the tag; leaving out the meta name="description" content="" part?

Just type in that would go inside the content "quotes".