Meta Description – what is it?

This is one of the first aspects of your onsite SEO which isn’t immediately visible to visitors to your website. It is a small chunk of code which sits in the html header of your webpage, and as such is not shown on the page which the visitor is looking at. Because it sits in the header of your file, it is read BEFORE any of the actual content of your website, and is vital to showing the search engines what your page is all about. Second in importance only to the title tags, the meta description is your first chance to make a good impression on the search engine robots. But dont be lulled into thinking that humans will never see this chunk of code, they will! As with any aspect of your onsite seo, your meta description should be relevant content, should not be “spammy” and should read well to humans.

The search engine view of meta description

A search engine will view your meta description as plain text, and will see it as a summary of your page. Because of this, don’t be tempted to add a meta description which then has no relevancy to the actual content of the page it appears on. The meta description and your content should be closely matched. Ideally, it should be one paragraph long (around 30-60 words) and should contain your main title tags as well as a range of other semantically linked words in a grammatically correct format. Doing this will set you up for human viewing, and as a direct result will therefore yield a good reward with the search engines. The robots are getting ever more intelligent and are now able to spot good content and good grammar, and a meta description prepared for human eyes will always rank higher than one prepared purely for the robots.

The human view of meta description

So, you are probably asking yourself why should I bother making this read well to a human? The meta description is the content which Google will display under your title in the search results, so it is your chance to elaborate on the title tag and persuade a visitor that this page really is relevant to the search term they entered and is worthy of their click. Spammy content will not get the click so a high position becomes a wasted opportunity. It is much better to rank second and have a persuasive chunk of text displayed than to rank first and have text which shows you up as a keyword spammer. The site in second with good content will always get more visitors.

Hopefully this article has helped explain what a meta description is and how it works for you. If you have asked us to complete your SEO on your behalf then you dont need to worry about this, we will guide you through it all (although having the knowledge yourself can never hurt). If you are doing your own SEO then we hope that the article explains everything for you, but please feel free to use the comment form below to ask us any further questions, or contact us to ask about your meta description.