Meta Description – what is it and what is its function in Google search?
- What is a meta description?
- Meta description examples and tips?
- What to know when preparing a Meta Tag Description
- Meta Description WordPress – Yoast Seo description
- Summary
In the article discussing what a meta title is, we touched on how a page is displayed in Google search. Now it’s time for a thorough presentation of another element that affects the traffic acquired and the perception of your website.
What is a Meta Description?
Meta Description is a Meta tag in the HTML code of a website. Its value is separately defined for both each blog post and the other pages. It is not a ranking factor like title, but it is worth ensuring that it is clear and unique. It is important because it appears directly in search results and in many cases can have a decisive impact on the behavior of a potential user visiting the site.
Meta description examples and tips
When working on the meta descriptions of a website, the main thing to keep in mind is their uniqueness. It is known that in the case of online stores where the same product appears in several or even a dozen variations, it can be a problem to create a unique meta description. However, here it is necessary to focus on the differences, which will maintain the uniqueness of the meta description.
The above examples best illustrate how to take advantage of the difference between product variants. Similarly, the situation is similar in the case of company pages that contain differentiated services so here the meta tag description will be much easier to prepare.
What to know when preparing a Meta Tag Description
If you want to prepare an attractive meta tag description, then you need to keep in mind its length, which is 155 characters including spaces. This is the optimal number of characters that will ensure full display of the description without trimming it. Following the rule of keeping the maximum length, you can easily create an attractive description that will be well received by potential customers. Here you should think carefully about what you want to include in the meta description, because it should be consistent with the content of the page. Otherwise, a user who has been “tempted” by an interesting meta title and description will leave the site much faster than he or she entered it. This will ultimately affect the value of the rejection rate, which is a valuable source of information for analyzing traffic within the site.
Meta Description WordPress – Yoast Seo description
Setting up meta tags on WordPress is easy and fun. This includes setting up Meta Description. WordPress is designed for more convenient creation and administration of websites. Therefore, here we have at our disposal the plugin mentioned in an earlier post Yoast SEO. Description set with it can be automatically retrieved from the content. However, we recommend its full personalization, because a well-crafted meta description will persuade users to enter such a website from search results.
On the other hand, if you skip filling in the field responsible for the meta description value, then it will be taken from the first paragraph of the subpage content. It is worth avoiding this especially in the case of subpages, because the meta description can contain the title of the entry and it will be the same value as in the meta title.
Summary
When setting meta tags, it is worth paying attention to the value of the meta description. Although it is not the main factor affecting the page positions, its duplication can affect the negative perception of the site and ineffective presentation in search results. You should also pay attention to its length so that you can include all the most important information in it.
