The meta description is a short text preview displayed for each search result that summarizes a page’s content.
Search engines show the meta description when it’s highly relevant to what the user is searching otherwise they might pick text from the page and create a dynamic description.
Although meta descriptions don’t have a direct effect on rankings, they are still a very important element of on-page SEO.
In this post, you will learn what are meta descriptions, how to write good meta descriptions (with examples) and why they still matter for SEO.
The meta description is a special HTML tag that is placed on the head of a webpage that looks like this:
<meta name=”description” content=”This is the page summary that is usually a couple of sentences long and might be shown in the search snippet of the page in the search results.” />
Visit any page you want, right click anywhere on the page and select VIEW SOURCE to look at the html contents of a page.
Search for meta name=”description” and you will see something like this:
The text that appears in the content=” “ is the custom description of the page.
For each and every entry shown in the search results, Google is creating a snippet based on the following:
Look at the example below:
In this case, Google decided to use the meta description provided using the Meta Description settings of the Genesis Framework, but as we will see in the examples below, this is not always the case.
Depending on the user query, Google may decide to use a dynamic meta description created from content found on the page to make it more relevant.
How to SEO optimize your meta descriptions
ou can follow the simple rules below to optimize your meta descriptions:
First, make sure that they are in the proper length. Don’t make your descriptions too short or too long. Aim for 160-320 characters.
Second, make use of the Performance Report that is available in the new version of Google Search Console and find out pages that have a low CTR.
Login to the new Google Search Console
Click OPEN REPORT to view the Performance Report.
Click on AVERAGE CTR and PAGES to view the average CTR of your pages. Click also on POSITION to view the average position of those pages in Google Search.
Sort the results by low CTRs and start analyzing the pages that have the lowest CTR but are in the first page of the search results.
Click on a particular page to view more details and then click on QUERIES.
What you see now is a report that shows for the particular page, the average CTR and position for each search query.
Find out which search queries have a low CTR and perform the same search in Google to see what description is shown in your snippet for the particular query.
Review your meta descriptions and make sure that they are highly relevant to the user query.
Important: You will probably notice that Google is not always using your custom meta description but sometimes it creates a dynamic description based on the content of the page.