What is a Meta Description? How Long, What to Write & Everything Else
If you’ve ever tried to do anything in the realm of SEO for your site, you may have heard a few terms that sound a bit unfamiliar.
One in particular that can get a little confusion is the meta description.
What is a meta description?
Maybe it’s best if I show you.
Take a look:
See that text underneath each listing? The 1-2 sentences or phrases that describe what the page is about or try to entice you to click? That’s the meta description for that page.
Pretty cool, huh?
Okay, maybe you don’t think so, but I do because I know the meta description is one of the key ways to hijack the search results without being the #1 listing.
So where do you find this thing? Or how do you add one to your own page or blog post?
The meta description is something that doesn’t show up on your page when you’re looking at it in your browser. It shows up in the code. I know – eek!
Don’t worry, most website platforms make it easy to edit your meta description for a particular page or post.
Here’s how to do that in WordPress:
And for another example, here’s how to do that in SquareSpace:
While editing any page or post, simply click the settings button and select “Basic Information” to edit your description for the page.
From the SquareSpace how-to: http://help.squarespace.com/guides/how-do-i-increase-my-site-visibility-to-search-engines
Not on Squarespace or WordPress? No problem. Just do a Google search for your platform + “how to edit meta description” or contact your website platform directly.
Will this help my rankings?
Not exactly.
There’s a lot that goes into the Google formula but the meta description for a page is not one of them. The meta description is more for CLICK-ABILITY.
The better your meta description, the more clicks your search result listing may get.
Your meta description may also be used by social media platforms when you share the link and a description of your page or post automatically shows up. For more click-ability!
How long should my meta description be?
Current advice is about 150 characters. Any longer and Google will start to cut you off.
If your description is too long, Google may decide to use its own description (pulling other text off of your page) as the description below your link in the results instead.
Though, Google has been known to pull its own description instead anyway – so your meta description is not guaranteed to show up in the results every time.
Any tips on what to write?
Think of it like the copy on an ad. Don’t give the whole blog post away but tease me about the topic. Why should I click?
If you need more help you might check out these copywriting tips from David Ogilvy – sometimes described as the “Father of Advertising – http://blog.kissmetrics.com/david-ogilvy/
What happens if you don’t include one?
If you don’t include a meta description…. Google will probably just pulls its own description for you from the copy off your page.
Sometimes, that can get a little ugly.
Look at meta description from 6pm versus the other listings.
Yuck.
Which would you click?
Hmm?
Consider that the next time you’re wondering if you need to spend time writing a meta description.
Because your competition would be more than happy if you didn’t.
Over to You
What did you think? Did you find this post useful? Have a question about meta descriptions? Do you use them on your site? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks Liz. Great post! Now I understand. Thank you for explaining it so clearly as always! I didn’t get that it was a teaser.
You are so welcome! Enjoy your teasing!
Just a quick clarification regarding Squarespace. The instructions you have here are to add a meta description to the homepage of a Squarespace site. It won’t affect any other page or post.
In Squarespace parlance, a page is any static page that is NOT a blog post. Anything you write in the blog is not called a page.
To add a meta description to pages you need to go to the page you want to edit and click on the Settings button from within the page.
Unfortunately, Squarespace doesn’t let you add a meta description to posts. This is one of the biggest things that bother me about it for precisely the reason you mention. The description in search results is always weird stuff that Google/Bing pull from the page and it looks like your first example. It’s pretty bad.