What is the Meta Description?
The meta description is a brief and useful explanation of a website for users. It should be a quick description of what a user would see by clicking that website. Some people believe that it doesn’t affect SEO, however, because it is effective on Click-Through Rate, it is indirectly related to your SEO and ranking on Google.
From the moment a user searches for something till the moment he enters a website, there is a war! A war among websites’ Meta Descriptions.
Think about these words:
- Special Seasonal Promotion
- 50% off
- New Collections’ Sale
If you see such a promotion on a store’s showcase, it will draw your attention and it is more likely that you enter that store.
We have almost the same thing on internet.
When a user searches for something and see 10 results, it is like that he is walking in a street with 10 stores. So, which stores he decides to enter depends on some factors such as names, appearances, showcases and so on.
Meta Description of a website in search result page is similar to a store’s showcase.
What Meta Description do exactly?
The meta description is a brief and useful explanation of a website for users. It should be a quick description of what a user would see by clicking that website. Some people believe that it doesn’t affect SEO, however, because it is effective on Click-Through Rate, it is indirectly related to your SEO and ranking on Google.
From Google’ Robots Point of View
Meta Description is a HTML tag which is placed in the page structure codes, and will be presented to Google’s algorithms as below:
<meta name="description" content="A page's description, usually one or two sentences."/>
From user’s point of view
After SEO subject, meta description is the most important factor in search pages. That would be displayed below the subject in a larger place but in a smaller font. In average, the number of characters to be displayed in a Meta Description is around 168, but it can be different based on the searched keywords and page contents.
Meta Description in WordPress
Fortunately, there are several plugins in WordPress that make the Meta Description optimization easier for us. For example, “Yoast” plugin has useful features for SEO and Meta Description Optimization. One of these features is the ability to determine a specific “Subject” and “Meta Description” for each page. To do that, you only need to install the plugin and put the data in “Yoast” section.
5 Things about Meta Description that Nobody Knows!
Till now, you know what is meta description and why we should consider that in our website. From now on, we try to discuss what is a good meta description to get more clicks.
1- Till 158 characters or more
Google has changed the number of meta description characters many times, but it seems that 158 is a safe number that Google consider all the time. In fact, there is not an ideal number of characters for you because it is dependent to what you want to show to that specific user. Anyway, our experience shows that brief and attractive explanations are better for users.
2- Using a relevant wording
Writing a brief of your page is not enough to attract users. It is better to use an interesting wording for your description. You should try to understand what a user thinks and needs to enter your website and write the description based on that.
3- Having a “Call-to-Action”
Meta description without having a “call-to-action” is not goanna work. If you are not asking the users to do anything in your description, it is like that you didn’t explain anything! You can use “call-to-action” such as below:
- By reading this article, you would realize the “Black Hat SEO” in detail
- By downloading SEO book, you can learn the SEO from basic to advanced for free
- By purchasing the newest mobile holders, you will not have any more concern for its stickiness
4- Including Targeted Keywords
If we want to summarize all the articles about “Meta Description”, we would find “Keywords” as a major factor in all of them. Keywords on Meta descriptions are so effective, and everyone consider that. Still, we recommend you use LSI keywords in your descriptions mostly. If you don’t know what LSI is, we suggest you read “LSI Keywords” article.
5- Showing the product’s features (For eCommerce Websites)
If you have an eCommerce website, meta description is one of the best places to present attractive features of your products. The more useful and attractive description you present, the more clicks you get.
You can also use “Schema-Markup” for the products’ features. By using this method, a bigger place in search page will be dedicated to your website.
Comparing some examples of Meta Descriptions
Here, we will go through some examples to see samples of good and bad meta descriptions:
How to write a good “Meta Description” in 3 steps?
Now that you know what is a good and bad meta description, it is time to learn how to write a good one:
First step: Try to present an accurate description of the page content for users. It means that a user should see what you explained in your description.
Second Step: Try to attract users by using attractive descriptions. As an example, you can add “Special Offer” or “Big Sale” to increase your chance to get more users.
If the page is an article, you can boost your click rate by adding something like “real examples” or “download free books”.
Third Step: Add the suggested similar keywords by Google to your description. That would attract users with similar keywords to your website in addition to your main keywords.
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