Meta Description is a summarized form of your article/content written in less than 160 characters to describe what your page/content/article is all about and helps search engines like Google to show them as snippets in their search engines. These snippets are then shown to the visitors/customers/readers who are looking for specific information about the topic you have written in your website.Writing a good quality Meta Description containing your Main Keywords – Primary and Secondary Keywords is very easy if you pay attention to the rules and guidelines defined in the SEO Starter Guide eBook by Google. The beauty of meta description should be to describe all your content that you wrote on a particular page in less than 160 characters can be challenging, and that is why we want to help you out to write the best meta descriptions that won’t sucks and converts visitors into readers.
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Many bloggers and Internet Marketers ignores the importance of writing an effective meta descriptions, that results in low quality sites, less traffic, lower clicks, low page views and traffic and hence very little to no sales or money. So lets learn about meta description or sometimes called as search engines snippets and its importance.
Meta description provide us the summarize content of the webpage. They are basically HTML attributes that describes the webpage to the search engines. In simple words, meta description can also be defined as the information that gives the user a short preview of what they are going to know a bit later in the website.
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Meta description does not affect the search engine rankings but it certainly improves the Click on the Websites and the number of visitors if written brief, simple, good and descriptive. It is surefire fact that if the snippet is good than there’s a great chance to improve the click through rates.
How to Write Quality Meta Description for SEO
1. Be in Limit:
Meta description usually contains 160 characters, as using more than 160 characters in the Meta description would be chopped off by the Search Engines. So be careful while writing a Meta description. If you are using WordPress, then a good SEO Plugin will tell you automatically that how many characters you have used already.
2. Simple but Impressive lines:
Your Meta description will only lead your website to more clicks, in simple it acts as a marketing agent for the Blog/Website. Use Phrases/Idioms to make a sentence impressive.So, write 160 characters in such a way that it attracts visitors and also impresses search engines. The information should be conveyed in the most simpler way that even noobs and newbie’s can understand.
3. Mind the Keywords: (Primary & Secondary)
Appropriate use of primary and secondary keywords can help you to get more organic traffic because basically, you are optimizing your webpage for particular keywords that you want your site to be found for those keywords. A well-written meta description would help in the race of grabbing attention of the users. Whatever, the user types in, Google highlights the terms which are searched by the users and returns the most relevant search results for the best user experience.
4. No Duplicate Meta Descriptions:
Some beginners use only one static meta description for all their pages, articles and contents which is not recommended. Never duplicate Meta description, as it not only degrades the quality but also a signs of copy content. So we recommend you to use one and only one Meta description for different posts to attract more users to the Blog/Website in the long run. Google also provides a tool to check your website against the duplicate pages/content including the duplicate title tags and meta description to help bloggers /content creators by analyzing their website against duplicate content penalities.
5. Not necessary for all Posts:
Writing meta description is always good for a post publicity and promotion. But there are some cases when there is no requirement to write meta description. If there is no meta description then search engines will automatically pick up the searched words from the posts. It is beneficial if there are major keywords or sometimes called long tail keywords in the post, then search engines will look up for the relevant keywords which are searched by a visitor.
6. Capital Wordings:
Do not capitalize all the words in the meta description. Use some words for more emphasis but not all, there must also be lower case wordings for the snippet. Also do not use quotation marks or symbols in the meta description as it is not accepted by Google Bots.
Thus, from this article now you are clear of How to write a impressive Meta description. Follow all the points seriously and you will definitely see a change in the visitors and click through rates for your Blog/Website.
7. No DMOZ Snippets Please
Google sometimes uses the snippets from the open directory project (dmoz.org), which is not recommended normally. This can lead to unwanted meta descriptions, therefore you should use these two tags to inform search engines not to use the open directory snippets.
<meta name="robots" content="NOODP">
<meta name="googlebot" content="NOODP">
These two lines should be included into the <head> section of your html document and will help you and search engines to use your own written meta descriptions. For WordPress Users, you can use the yoast SEO, Premium SEO pack or Meta Robots plugin to include this feature.
8. Automatic Programming Based Meta Descriptions
As google stated here, automated or programmatic meta descriptions can also be used for large database driven websites or content aggregates and can work perfectly normal.
9. Everyone Hates Spamming
This is the most common problem a blogger or webmaster tries to implement, cheat and trick the Google. But believe the fact, Google uses a very complex algorithm to rank websites and returns the most relevant search results. Any black hat tactic like that will sooner or later be tracked by their system and you will get a strict penalty in their next algorithm update.
Most Common Mistakes in writing Meta Description
- Keyword Stuffing – Unnecessarily use of too many keywords in <meta> description tag.
- Repeated Titles – Webmasters duplicates the <title> tag information in <meta> description tag.
- Html Improvements – Not checking duplicate issues in your Google Webmaster Tools Account.
10. Proper Use of Robots.txt
This is a simple but very powerful text file that search engines uses to whether crawl or not crawling a particular website. Normally, this is document that lies in the root directory of your webpage.
|For Example : http://www.webliska.com/robots.txt
In WordPress, one can use the KB Robots plugin to generate a robots.txt file but use it if you know the rules about it. Otherwise stay away from it. The official Google recommendation and guide for using the robots.txt file is given here.
I hope you know now, how to write the good quality <meta> description tags for your blog articles. Do tell us if you like it or tip us if we missed something.
Related Useful Tips
- Taking your Meta Description to next level – You can now also use “Rich Snippets” that contains your structured data in recommended formats like microformat, microdata, rdfa. Check out this official Video from Google : Introduction to Rich Snippets
This supports a wide variety of content types including reviews, people, products, events, businesses and a lot more. So start using Rich Snippets in your meta description to drive more traffic to your website.
An example of your <meta> description tags after using rich snippets will be very informative and beautiful that attracts more visitors to your website naturally.
2. Webmasters can make use of free tools like Structure data testing tools inside their webmaster tools to know and understand how data will be shown to you and used by search engines. If you don’t know how to submit website to search engines, you can read on this link.