Stoopid noobie question:

Does a spider only read tagged html, or is the spider capable of "reading" the content of the page itself?

I have omitted description tags, because each page on my retail site is a detailed description of the item I'm selling.

Do the spiders see that or not?

I would include the description tag - spiders see those
Yes the spiders also read the text visible by humans

Thanks, Matte. That's what I always assumed. The text does get "read".

So,... why repeat the info twice using a "description" tag?

If anything, wouldn't that be "spamming"?

it seems not

I use very similar text for titile, desc and H1 and then a longer version for the intro paragraph.

Works for me.

Spiders "READ" Everything

For html they consider contnet to be everything outside of tags, plus any tag comments, such as alt

ie - anything that can be displayed in a rendered page to a user viewing it as a webpage.

Google are also able to spider, index and display snippets of other file formats including, but not limited to, -
.txt
.doc
.pdf

They read both but....

Your title and description tag is generally what's listed in natural search engine result pages, therfore having a 'catchy' title tag and description tag could also help you gain additional clickthru traffic via SERPs.

So for example, if I searched on how to fly a kite in google. The top results are listed using the title and description tag on the relevant pages in question.

It would therefore makesense to have 'How To Fly A Kite' in my title and description tag if this was my site's target topic / keyword.

How to perform well for the keyword / keyphrase 'How To Fly A Kite' is a different matter, but having it in my title and description tag would be a start!

Cheers

True, the title is usually displayed as the link to your site in the SERPs,

But - the text underneath is very rarely your meta description tag.

This text is usually an excerpt from your page that contains the search phrase. If you are seeing your meta description instead - something's wrong elsewhere (eg no content!)

i beg to differ on that point, all the meta descriptions on my website are the underlying text on natural searches.... then again, my descriptions are usually a snippett of descriptive text from the content but all the same, what are the chances that the SE's see the same text on the page as in the descrip and post that due to obvious relevance? It cant  just be coincidence that the same text i use for my descrips always appears under the title in the searches?

I stick to my point -

you're doing something wrong elsewhere if your description appears under your link in the serps.

maybe you're only querying the SEs for the keyword you've targeted - 80% of your serps will come from searching without typing in your keywords.

SEs want to display the relevant part of your content with the keywords in. this tells me the SEs are having trouble finding your content, or cannot justify showing what they have

na, i know its reading my pages just fine, and the random search terms i get found for can only come from the content... like lion attacks, that aint a targeted keyword but people still find my site for it... crazy. Perhaps the reason the serps keep that descrip is because its more relevant to the page than anything else... it is after all a copy and paste description.

I fear this may call for a Rank Whore type experiment