Optimizing meta description tag is a core element in SEO process. It’s the only chance you can convert potential visitors from search engines to real visitors by using informative, compelling and interesting description tag.
What Is Meta Description Tag?
You can think of your description name as the copy for an ad. Google and other search engines use this to display in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Meta description tag is part of the head section in HTML code.
<html>
<head>
<meta name="description" content="Define your description here." />
</head>
<body>
Content
</body>
</html>How To Optimize Meta Description Tag?
You have 155 characters including spaces to craft an informative, compelling and interesting description for your potential visitors and search engines. You should use your keyword at least once in the description name tag and put it as close to the start as possible. This is to show that you have relevant content for the keyword. Search engines will give you better ranking if you have relevant content for the keyword searching by visitors.
However, you don’t actually have to define your own meta description tag. Most search engines have the intelligence of extracting what they need for the description from your web pages. Some SEO experts recommend defining a meta description tag for the home page and leaving the rest of your web pages blank and letting search engines assign what they want to display.
I’m not agreed with them. If you leave it to search engines to decide, there’s no guarantee they’ll choose the correct section to display. As a human, we have better writing skills and we know how to summarize the best of our content into a few sentences in our description field. I recommend you define the meta description tag manually instead of letting machines do it for you.
It’s also not a good idea to use same description on every of your web page because it’s a copy for an ad supposed to be helpful and persuade searchers to click through. Some more, if Google see the same copy on every page, then it will decide to pull the description from the page content instead of using your default value.
How The Meta Description Tag Should Look Like?
If you’re targeting “cheap second hand computers” for one of your particular web page, then your meta description should look something like this:
<meta name="description" content="Cheap second hand computers for sale. All computers are in great condition and come with Microsoft Windows & Office installed & 5 year warranty." />You can see that the keyword appeared once in the description and is at the beginning of the description. It gives all the relevant and compelling information and should be able to make people click through it.
Conclusion
Meta description tag is the only chance you can convert potential visitors from search engines to real visitors. You should craft your own informative, compelling and interesting description instead of letting search engines randomly assign it for you.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Great tips on optimizing the meta description tag Bey, I’ll be checking all mine again later thanks to this. My keywords are in my description but I may have to move them nearer the beginning of the sentence.
Thanks,
Carol
Affiliate Program Opportunities
Thanks for Such a good Information.
its better to make different meta descriptions for every page because every page tells different stories to users.
thanks for the tips by the way.
Hi,
I’m confused can you help.
I have analyzed my blog and found that my keywords are not in my description, which obviously I want them to be.
I am using the All In One SEO plugin and the meta name line in my header looks like this:
<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress ” />
Can I just change it as per your example, without affecting anything else ?
Many thanks,
Bill