{"id":1705,"date":"2019-11-12T10:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-11-12T02:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/?p=1705"},"modified":"2023-01-09T12:40:24","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T04:40:24","slug":"what-is-a-meta-description","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/tip-sharing\/what-is-a-meta-description","title":{"rendered":"What is a meta description?"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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What is a meta description, exactly? If you\u2019re creating a website from scratch and using a standard website builder, you might see a space available for a meta description on every page of your site.\u00a0<\/p>

If you pay attention to best practices in the search engine optimization (SEO) realm, you\u2019ve undoubtedly heard about meta descriptions in the past.<\/p>

So, What is a meta description?<\/strong><\/h3>

A meta description is an HTML tag in the HTML code of your website.<\/p>

Which allows you to customize a section of text that describes the page itself. It plays a role in how your page is seen by search engine crawlers, and how it appears in SERPs.<\/p>

In your website builder, you likely have a box labelled \u201cmeta description,\u201d where you can add text to apply to your page. In the back end of your HTML code, you\u2019ll see something like this:<\/p>

Google\u2019s search engine crawlers \u201cunderstand\u201d that meta tags in the back end of your code<\/a> are meant to describe the nature of the content of your pages. It\u2019s not certain whether it’s affects your rankings directly, but it can affect your ranking in indirect ways.<\/p>

As you learn, you\u2019ll notice they\u2019re also frequently used as part of a page\u2019s entry in a SERP.<\/p>

Run any Google search, and you\u2019ll see a list of web pages. The title of the website will be highlighted in blue and prominent, and underneath that, you\u2019ll see the URL for the page in green. Right below that, you\u2019ll see a section of black text, this is usually the meta description of the page.<\/p>

If your meta description is effective in this persuasion, you\u2019ll see a higher click-through rate (CTR).<\/p>

Which is beneficial both for your total organic traffic and for your search rankings (most likely, CTR might be correlated with higher search rankings, rather than being a root cause).<\/p>

\"meta<\/p>

What is the purpose of ?\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>

The meta description is your chance to tell both web crawlers and human users what your page is about.<\/span><\/p>

For web crawlers, it serves as a context for understanding the relevance of your page. For human users, it\u2019s a chance to see what the page (and the brand) are all about. Lastly, you, it\u2019s an opportunity to rank higher for relevant searches and persuade more web users to visit your site, instead of a competitor\u2019s in the SERPs.<\/span><\/p>

Elements of an effective meta description<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>

When writing an effective meta description, you\u2019ll have two main goals. You\u2019ll want to appease search engine crawlers to earn higher rankings for relevant keywords.<\/span><\/p>

You\u2019ll want to persuade more people to click on your SERP listing rather than a competing one.<\/span><\/p>

The length<\/span><\/strong><\/h3>

First, you\u2019ll need to keep the length concise and short enough to fall within the limits of search engine crawlers. Historically, the limit for meta description length has been 155 characters.<\/span><\/p>

Even with that longer upper limit, it\u2019s a good idea to keep your meta descriptions tight. That way, users will be more likely to read all of your text, and you\u2019ll have a lower chance of getting cut off by mobile or another special formatting.<\/span><\/p>

Try to keep it to 160 characters or fewer and use a maximum of two sentences. For your reference, this sentence is 51 characters.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is a meta description, exactly? If you\u2019re creating a website from scratch and using a standard website builder, you might see a space available for a meta description on every page of your site.\u00a0 If you pay attention to best practices in the search engine optimization (SEO) realm, you\u2019ve undoubtedly heard about meta descriptions …<\/p>\n

What is a meta description?<\/span> Read More \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13282,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"default","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"default","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":"","_wpscppro_custom_social_share_image":0},"categories":[30],"tags":[36],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1705"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1705"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15761,"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1705\/revisions\/15761"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mondoze.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}