Meta Descriptions for SEO

25 May 2019
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A Meta description of a web page influences click through rate (CTR) and organic traffic. It is a text that appears below the page title and target URL in a search engine result. A well-executed Meta description tag can help you to improve website traffic and CTR because it motivates users to click on your search result. This HTML attribute <meta> is one of the SEO terms and can be used to summarize the content of web pages. Even today, SEO experts consider a well-written, compelling or provoking Meta description as an indirect ranking factor in an SEO strategy. Write your descriptions in such a way that users click your website links.

 

A. Length of Meta Description: The display of description in search results does not exceed 160 characters. Digital Marketing Boy suggests you keep Meta descriptions of your web pages to 160 characters including spaces. Be sure that you include all the relevant information in this limited space. You should limit the description to 120 characters if you are optimizing the content as per the mobile SERPs. The images displayed in the snippets due to Schema Markup implementation caused a huge limitation of the character count. You can use one of the powerful SEO Tools 'SmallSEOTools Meta Tag Analyzer' to check the length of the Meta Description.

 

B. Optimizing Meta Description: It is better to use three to four short sentences rather than one long sentence in a Meta description. Always include a call-to-action and this will make users click on the search result. Digital Marketing Boy would like you to include the main keyword in the description. Every description of a web page should be unique in your SEO strategy. The addition of special characters highlights the Meta description but these should not be used excessively.

C. NOODP: If your website is listed in DMOZ directory then NOODP tag prevents search engines to display description sourced from DMOZ, instead of your Meta description. Use <meta name="robots" content="noodp" /> to apply NOODP.

Access the source code of a web page if you want to check a Meta description tag. WordPress SEO plugin 'Yoast SEO' helps you to optimize Meta descriptions if you are running your website on a WordPress platform. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook extract data (Title tag, Meta description and images) from HTML whenever you share a link on them. Meta descriptions are very important once your website ranks on the first page of search results.