The Freeway 5 manual recommends putting description tags only on your homepage (see below). It admits that opinions differ, so what do other people think?
Should you tag all your pages?
Opinions differ on whether it is a good thing to add description and keywords tags to every page in your site. It is probably best though to define these tags only for the home or index page. The reason for this is that once your site becomes live and has been indexed by several search engines, references to your site may abound in the outside world and will be largely outside your power to change. This becomes a problem if you subsequently move or rename the pages which are referenced by outside agencies, as the links to your site will be broken and people will find it far less easy to get to your pages. The one page which will always be there in the future and whose name is unlikely to change, is the home page. Another reason is that you generally want visitors to come through the front page so that they will see any new information you have added since the last time they visited.
On the basis that a) I don’t intend to move or rename pages if I can help it and b) I’m happy if visitors don’t arrive via the home page, my hunch is that the manual’s arguments don’t apply in my case.
The only other question is how much attention search engines pay to tags these days.
Sometime around 10/3/09 (at 06:19 -0400) Mark F Fisher said:
The only other question is how much attention search engines pay to
tags these days.
Essentially none as far as indexing is concerned, although
descriptions can factor in what people see in some search engine
results. However, it is arguable that having description content that
relates clearly to the text content of the page will gain you small
brownie points.