What Is A Meta Description And Why Is It Important?

A meta description is a small description of your content – a summary that helps readers and search engines better understand what to expect. Your meta description can boost your SEO, so it’s well worth spending time crafting a good one. 

A meta description helps describe your page. It is a short snippet of text that appears in the search engine results under the article headline. It’s a chance for you to succinctly describe what your article is about in an appealing and informative way to make people want to find out more. 

If you aren’t sure whether your web pages have meta descriptions or what they are, you can discover this by right-clicking on any page and selecting “view source” or “view page source”:

Your meta description tag will look like this:

<meta name=”description” content=“Your pages meta description here” />

<meta name=”keywords” content=”meta description,google meta description,meta name description” />

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />

A good meta description will provide search engine users with a short description of what they can expect to find if they choose to click on the link and visit your website. 

Google generally truncates snippets to ~155–160 characters. So your meta can be longer than this, but it will get cut off when displayed on a SERP. Ideally, all the information should be within the 155-160 character limit. Try to ensure that your descriptions are sufficiently descriptive so that people get the most information possible to help them make a decision about whether or not to find out more. 

Your meta description is important because it’s linked to your ads – if your ad is ranked for a keyword then Google will use the meta description you’ve written as a summary of the page. A good meta will, therefore, make a massive difference in terms of your click-through rate from organic search results. 

Tips on writing good meta descriptions:

Research relevant keywords and use them in your meta descriptions

Make sure you don’t choose keywords you are targeting on other pages
Don’t use the same meta description for different pages of your site – they should all have unique meta’s.

Try to demonstrate the benefits a customer will receive if they click through

Appeal to a viewers emotion and demonstrate value

So if you have a website and want to attract more customers, make sure that each page has a compelling, unique, keyword-targeted meta description to accompany it, and use the above tips to create ones that really work for you!