Phone number in Meta Description - Is it a good idea?

[mathamatix]

Is it a best practice to place your company's phone number in the meta description for a page? Are there any rules as to what is acceptable for meta tags? One of our competitors recently started doing this but for some reason I think it might be against Google's guidelines. They (competitor) is also engaging in web spam, plagiarizing our content,  and other black hat techniques so I'm leery of anything they do.

[SamuelScott]

Regardless of what the competitor is doing, it does not violate Google guidelines to put a phone number in a meta description. You can put whatever text you want -- especially since the meta description is no longer a ranking factor. Putting the phone number there can be a very good idea -- it minimizes the distance between the prospect and a salesperson.

However, the issue is that such a scenario is not easily tracked in analytics (and it probably cannot be tracked at all). I'll post a few links have on how to integrate phone-based inquiries with Google Analytics:

How Call Tracking With Google Analytics Increases Your Profits

Mobile Calls Are the New Conversions

I hope this helps!