What are Meta Descriptions

After the title tag, meta description tag is another factor to get the most out of the search engine result pages (SERPs). Unfortunately, many webmasters pay very little (or no) attention to this under-rated SEO element, and as a result, they lose more than 50% of their traffic on the SERPs.

Yes! When your webpage appears in SERPs meta description is responsible to attract the user towards your website.

What Is a Meta Description and Why Is It Important?

A meta description is a snippet of information that appears below the title in a SERP. Its major purpose is to provide useful information about the contents of a webpage.  A good meta description is also responsible for convincing the visitor to click through your website, hence increase CTR of your webpage.

See how meta description appears in SERPs.

The meta description is commonly neglected by webmasters since it doesn’t play any role in ranking your webpage. However, it plays an important role in increasing click through rate of your webpage. Moreover, researches prove that the website that have a well-written meta description get considerably more visitors every day that those that don’t. It is mainly because meta description gives the searchers get a clear idea of what they can expect when they navigate to your site. The words that match the searcher’s query are bolded by search engines as well.

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Meta Description HTML Form

In HTML meta description looks like;

<meta name=”description” content=”Learn how to write meta description. Yes, this is your first meta description example. Get more information in below paragraphs.”/>

Why You Must Write a Meta Description?

Generally, there is only a certain amount of people that scroll down a SERP to the results at the bottom. The click-through rates decrease as you go down the search results, because obviously, the most relevant result is at the top. Therefore, it is very important that you write a great meta description that catches the searchers’ eyes as they are scrolling down the SERPs.

What if your page appears at the top of the search results? Well, you should still write a clear and persuasive meta description in order to prevent users from scrolling down. Makes sense?

How to Write an SEO Meta Description that Gets Click

There are no well-defined rules for writing the best meta description, but there are some best practices that if you follow properly, you’ll find yourself writing tempting meta descriptions in no time.

A meta description is more or less like a sales copy. It is the bait, after your title tag that you have to attract your reader to click. It should convince your reader in every possible way so that they find it almost impossible to resist your offer.

Here are some points you should consider in order to write a meta description that is clear, helpful and outstanding.

Meta description length

Keep it under 150-155 characters. Anything longer than that will be truncated.

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Make it specific and relevant

Your meta description should be specifically written to suit the contents of your webpage. It should inform the reader about what is next to the click.

Include relevant keywords

This makes your relevance obvious to the users and search engines.

Make it descriptive

Never list your keywords. Blend them naturally with your words to craft out a descriptive, well-written meta description.

Include the YOU factor

Tell your reader what is there for them. Mention how you can benefit them or provide solution to their problems.

Inspire action

Start your meta descriptions with words like “Learn”, “Grab” or “Discover”. Then tell them what exactly they’ll find if they click.

Avoid quotes

Quotes get cut off by Google. Therefore, it is best to use any alpha-numeric characters.

Never deceive searchers

Don’t include something in your description that you aren’t offering. It will cause you to lose more traffic than anything else.

Avoid duplicate meta descriptions on the website

Write a unique meta description for every webpage.

Experiment

Test your meta description after you’ve written it. If it doesn’t meet your expectations, write another, and another, and another, until you come up with the one that works best for you.

Sometimes, it is better to leave out the meta description when your webpage contains several target keywords. For instance; the pages containing hundreds of articles or blog entries, in such cases Google extracts the most relevant snippet from your page and displays it to the searcher.

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Again, this is not the case with many of us. So, it is always the wisest thing to make the best use of those 155 characters to engage with your potential customers.