What is a meta description?

Continuing with our blog series on meta tags, this post looks at the meta description. The meta description tag plays an important part in optimising your site (SEO) and a crucial role in gaining click throughs from the search results.

The meta description tag is a piece of hidden HTML coding (known as a tag) that allows some search engines to display a description of your site in search results.

You will normally find the meta description within the < head > tags, just below the title tag. The code will look like this:

<META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”The description of your web page will go here”>

Your meta description will most often be shown in the search results:

Google will normally show the meta description if it feels it is relevant to the searchers query (which if your page is relevant to the search query and is being shown in the search results, hopefully your meta description is an accurate account of what can be found on that page, so Google will most likely always show your meta description). If you don’t have a meta description, Google will extract a piece of text from your page and display that.

The meta description can play an important part in getting searchers to click on your page within the results. Just because you’re on the first page of search results, it doesn’t guarantee you any clicks. You have to compel people to click on your page and not the other 9 (or other 10 or so paid listings). This is where the meta description comes in handy. You should try and craft a description with a strong call to action. Linking the content to the title tag content is also a good way to reinforce your message. Have these two tags working together to persuade people to click. If you can get some keywords in here, that’s great. You’ll notice in the search engine results that the terms you’ve searched will be highlighted in bold in the search results. So if you have some keywords in your meta description (and title tag), then these will be made bold if they match the search query.

It’s a good idea to try and keep the meta description to within 150 characters. Different search engines display different amount of text in their results, but if you keep it to within 150, then you’ll generally be covered in all.

If you need any help crafting some effective meta tags, please get in touch with a member of the SMEketing team.