The meta description is a snippet of up to 155 characters, an HTML tag, that summarizes the content of a page. Search engines show the meta description in the search results, especially when the search phrase is within the description, so optimizing the meta description is crucial for on-page SEO.

Meta description tags can have a significant impact on your search engine optimization efforts. The meta description has a central value:

Why Are Meta Descriptions Important To SEO?

Your meta description acts as “organic ad copy”.

This means that when your ad ranks for a keyword, Google and other engines generally show the meta description as a summary of the page.

This makes the meta description as important as ad text.

A compelling meta description has the power to increase the click-through rate of your organic search results. This means that more people who see your page in search results actually click and visit the site. That means more traffic for you, even if your ranking remains the same!

Purpose Of Meta Description

The goal of a meta description for your page is simple: to convince someone who searches Google to click on your link. In other words, there are meta descriptions to generate clicks on search engines.

Search engines say there is no direct benefit to ranking the meta description: they don’t use it in their ranking algorithm. But there is an indirect benefit: Google uses clickthrough rate (CTR) as a way to determine if you are a good result. If more people click on your result, Google will consider it a good result and, based on your position, it will take you to the hierarchy. So optimizing your meta description is as important as optimizing your headlines.

What Is The Ideal Length Of A Meta Description?

Meta descriptions can be any length, but Google generally truncates snippets to ~ 155 to 160 characters. It is best to keep meta descriptions long enough to be descriptive enough; therefore, we recommend descriptions between 50 and 160 characters. Remember that the “ideal” size will vary depending on the situation, and your primary goal should be to deliver value and generate clicks.

How Do You Write A Good Meta Description?

Best practices for creating good meta descriptions are very similar to writing great ad text:

• Use researched, targeted keywords in your meta descriptions.
• Make sure they are hyper-relevant to the content of each page; never use the same meta description throughout the site.
• Communicate benefits and urgency.
• Compel users to click to show value and appealing to emotions.

What Is SEO Best Practices For Meta Description?

1. Write compelling ad Copy

The meta description tag serves the function of advertising copy. It attracts readers to a SERP website and is, therefore, a very visible and important part of search marketing. Creating a compelling, readable description using important keywords can improve the click-through rate for a given web page.

To maximize click-through rates on search engine results pages, it’s important to note that Google and other search engines display bold keywords in the description when they match search queries. This bold text can draw researchers’ attention, so you should combine your descriptions to search for terms as closely as possible.

2. Actionable And Written In An Active Voice

Of course, it should. If you consider the meta description to be an invitation to the page, you cannot just make it “A mixed metaphor describing a non-existent and implicitly high rating level.” This is a drab description and people don’t know what they will get.

3. Avoid Duplicate Meta Description Tags

As with title tags, it is important that the meta descriptions on each page are unique. Otherwise, you will get SERP results that will look like this:

One way to combat duplicate meta descriptions is to implement a dynamic and programmatic way to create unique meta descriptions for automated pages. However, if possible, there is no substitute for an original description that you write for each page.

4. Including A Call To Action

“Hello, we have such a new product and you want it. you want it. Find out more! “This overlaps what I said about active voice, but I wanted to emphasize it. It’s your sales text, where your product is the linked page and not the product on that page. Invitations like Get More Information, Get It Now, Try It Free, be useful here.

5. Don’t Include Double Quotation Marks

Every time quotes are used in the HTML of a meta description, Google cuts that description in quotes when it appears in a SERP. To prevent this from happening, your best bet is to remove all non-alphanumeric characters from the meta descriptions. If the quotes are important in your meta description, you can use the HTML entity instead of the double quotes to avoid truncation.

6. Matching Content

That is important. Google will find out when meta descriptions trick visitors to click and can even penalize sites that do. Also, misleading descriptions are likely to increase the bounce rate. It’s a bad idea for just that reason. You want the meta description to match the content of the page.

7. Unique

If your meta description is the same as on other pages, your Google user experience will be affected. Although the page titles may vary, all pages will look the same, because all descriptions are the same. If you want / need / are intentionally tempted to create a duplicate meta description, it is best to leave the description blank. Google will select a fragment of the page that contains the keyword used in the query.

Conclusion

Meta descriptions aren’t going away anytime soon.

The sooner you learn how to create a good description, the sooner you can start increasing your ranking and helping your overall SEO efforts.

Since meta descriptions are part of your site’s overall user experience, Google takes them very seriously when it comes to your SEO.

And surprisingly, one of the most surprising ways to start improving your focus is to forget about items like character counting.

Instead, try to be unique and interesting.

Interact with your potential visitor and show them what you have to offer.

If you create the right approach and implement strong keywords, you will start to see more organic traffic over time.

And if you use structured data elements to strategically position your brand, it will further highlight Google and its users.