What is Meta Description?
Meta description is a short paragraph that is
placed in the HTML code of a webpage. It is a kind of advertising copy that
briefly describes the content of your page. The meta description appears under
the URL of your page in search engine result pages. It is also known as a
snippet and is one of the components of SEO, and SEO is one component of
digital marketing.
The meta description is an important part of search
marketing, i.e. a relevant and compelling description draws users from search
engine result pages to your website, which improves the click through rate for
that webpage. The purpose of a meta description is to get users searching on
Google to click your link.
It is a meta tag, so it is specified in the head
section of an HTML document as shown below:
1.
<head>
2.
<meta name="description" content="description of the webpage.">
3. </head>
The element "name" tells the search
engines about the element of the HTML code, which has been specified. The
attribute "content" specifies the content of the element, as shown in
the above syntax.
Thus, it is a way to provide a short description of
the page content in search results. So, it should be optimized for SEO as it
has a significant impact on your page's click-through rate (CTR) in search
results.
Some instructions to write optimized
meta descriptions are listed below:
- Keywords: A meta description
that contains important keywords can generate a high level of attention
among users. So, incorporate the most important keywords in your meta
description.
- Readability: It should be simple and
relevant, i.e. it should read like a human-written sentence, and keyword
stuffing should be avoided. Most importantly, it should be a comprehensive
description of your page content.
- Compelling: It should be as
compelling as possible, i.e. it should clearly describe the content of the
page.
- Length: It should be up to 135
to 300 characters long else search engine will truncate it, so keep the
important keywords in the first or second line of the description. Google
displays around 500 pixels of meta description in SERPs, which is equal to
around 160 characters. If your description exceeds this number, it will be
shortened by "...." and users won't get the complete idea about
the content of your page.
- Don't
repeat: Write
different meta descriptions for different pages else, the search engine
may penalize you for repeating the same description on different pages.
- Call
to action: You
can incorporate call-to-action in your meta description such as buy, read,
compare, download, etc. It helps increase your CTR as it encourages users
to visit your page. For example, an online shop can arouse the interest of
users by using words like "Order now", "Big sale,"
etc. Furthermore, by using special characters like hearts, hooks, etc.,
you can draw attention to your result snippet on Google.
- Separate
meta description for each page: Provide separate metadescription for
each page of your website to help users understand your pages and show up
it on search engine result pages for relevant queries made by users. If
you can't have a description for each subpage, it is better not to use a
metadescription at all. In such cases, Google uses a text extract of your
page as a description that contains the search terms.
- Use
rich snippets: You
can use schema markup to add elements to the snippets to increase their
appeal such as customer reviews, star ratings, product information, and
more.
Meta Description: Syntax:
1.
<!DOCTYPE html>
2. <html>
3. <head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
4. <title> Web Page Title Example </title>
5. <meta name = "description" content="this is meta description example upto 155 characters">
6. </head>
7. <body>
8. <p>Welcome to my first web page.</p>
9. </body>
10. </html>
