What are meta descriptions and do they have any impact on SEO?

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Meta Descriptions - What are they and do they have any impact on SEO?

Graeme Buckley • September 17, 2021

What are meta descriptions?

Meta descriptions provide quick explanations of the contents of a web page and are HTML tags, and just like title tags, they appear on every webpage.

Here is Infoserve.com’s homepage meta description…

While not essential for any website, meta descriptions have been used by web designers for years to describe the content of that specific webpage.

Furthermore, meta descriptions can display under your website in Google’s search results. Therefore, well written meta descriptions are extremely important in gaining user click-through from Google, as these short paragraphs are your chance to advertise your content to searchers and let them know exactly what the given page contains. For example here…

However, it not 100% certain that Google will use your meta description on it’s results page, and like with title tags, if they are not done or are poor, Google will use it’s own.

Do meta descriptions have any impact on SEO?

Well, not directly.

Unfortunately, years ago, people used to spam their meta descriptions and keywords fields with the hope of it improving their rankings. Like any underhanded practise, Google picked up on this and disavowed any SEO impact for the meta description field, but they are still used on the search results pages.

Therefore, since meta descriptions show in the search engine results, they can affect CTRs (click through rates), which are linked to SEO & rankings. So, in theory, meta descriptions might have an impact on SEO and are generally always looked at on online website and SEO audits.

Infoserve have always made it their practise to write meta descriptions for every website we build and for any SEO project started.

How do you write meta descriptions?

In the early days of website design, you had to write the meta description directly into the document, however these days most websites are built on a content management system, such as Wordress or similar to our Gravity sites, which easily allow one to add and edit meta descriptions.

Tips for writing effective meta descriptions

Here are some handy tips for writing concise meta descriptions.

Keep the meta description under 150-160 characters, Google will cut off the rest.

Make each meta description unique to that page.

Include your pages keyword amongst the description.

Treat each page as it’s own website, explain what is on ‘that’ page.

Make your meta descriptions readable, not a list.

How to check on a websites meta descriptions

Run the website through our free digital marketing audit tool.

Digital marketing audit meta descriptions

Our marketing tool acts as a website audit and SEO audit platform and can show you how the meta descriptions are scoring.

If our audit is picking up issues with your meta descriptions, contact our friendly team and we can advise you how we can help you.

Or check out our websites and SEO product pages.

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